Upgrading your theme

Note: While you have access to lifetime theme updates with every theme purchase, Flexkit does not offer theme update services. This article will guide you on how to do this yourself, or with the help of experts.
If your team are not able to perform upgrading properly, please contact us.
This requires basic knowledge of using Shopify Online Editor

Manual upgrading the theme can only be executed correctly when your theme code is in its' original state.
This means that you haven't installed any apps that made code changes, nor have you made any manual edits, including modified translations in the language editor.

If you or an installed app made any code changes to your theme and you want to keep these changes, then you need to copy your code to the new version or reconfigure some apps.

Code changes include:

  • Manual code changes to your theme files through the Code Editor (except files in the /templates folder and settings_data.json).
  • Code changes that an app installed on your store has made to your theme on your behalf.

Upgrading 3.x to higher:

  1. To copy all your sections and settings over from your old theme, open the code editor for your old theme, find the config folder from the sidebar and copy everything from settings_data.json.
  2. Now open the code editor for the new version of the theme and paste everything into the same file, config/settings_data.json, and Save the file.
  3. Copy everything from templates/index.json for your old theme and paste into the same file in the new theme version.
  4. Also copy over the templates for pages, products, and collections by copying over the contents of the JSON template for each and pasting the contents of those files into the same file in the new theme version.
  5. Custom templates can be brought over using the exact same process, however, you'll need to create the JSON template in the new theme files since they won't exist there by default.
    More details here from Shopify on creating new templates in the new theme.

Upgrading v2 to v3:

Upgrading 2.x to 3.x needs expertise and experience with Shopify settings schema and JSON data manipulation.

  1. Copy content of config/settings_data.json for old version and past somewhere in your local computer. You should work with this file in order to keep v2 theme code not to be modified.
  2. Open the code editor of v3 theme, go through all JSON files one by one inside the templates folder.
    Replace section settings of v3 JSON templates with v2 settings if settings key exists in the 2.0 content. (Skip index.json here) For example, if you look at templates/article.json in v3 theme code, you can find "template-article" JSON key inside "sections" object. Find "template-article" key in v2 settings data and copy/paste that JSON object into templates/article.json.
  3. After updating all JSON templates, open index.json in v2 theme code. It has some sections with randomized name. e.g. "1578520862827"
    These sections should be moved to index.json of v3 theme code.
    Copy content inside "content_for_index" JSON object of v2 settings data and paste it to "order" object of index.json file of v3 theme code.
  4. Copy/paste all other remaining content of v2 settings to settings_data.json for v3 theme code.

JSON templates introduced in Venedor 3.0:
article.json, 404.json, blog.json, cart.json, collection.json, collection.nested-collection.json, index.json, list-collections.json, page.about-us.json, page.contact.json, page.json, page.privacy-policy.json, product.json, product-center-image(available).json, product.default.json, product-grid-images(available).json, product.with-sidebar(available).json, search.json, config/settings_data.json