Shopify Editions are back with another batch of exciting updates. Here are some of the highlights that caught our tech team’s attention.
Hydrogen 2: Built on Remix
Leveraging Remix, Hydrogen will be going even deeper into the storefront toolkit, unlocking a number of new capabilities. It will also help to improve some existing components of Hydrogen that are core to its performance. Below, we'll talk about a couple of the key improvements and how our team is aiming to utilize them moving forwards.
Data Loading
Remix makes it easier than ever to manipulate your data to fit our desired outcome. We'll now have the ability to filter out problematic requests and provide more helpful error messages, and also be able to safeguard against performance issues like request waterfalls. Remix removes the need for most providers built in Hydrogen v1, making global state management easier, and preventing any re-rendering gotchas.
Error Handling
When something goes wrong, we want to contain the issue as much as possible, and provide helpful messages that ultimately help turn a potentially negative customer experience into a positive one. Thanks to the newly released nested error boundaries, only the parts of the page related to the issue will respond differently, with everything else around it still working as you'd expect.
Metaobjects
Metaobjects are a new custom data structure that further extends Shopify metafields. Essentially, metafields are becoming more and more like a CMS. This will allow for greater flexibility and a better admin experience when building custom features for clients.
Previously, you would have had to create a unique field for each custom data point—which could quickly get really repetitive and difficult to manage long-term. Now, we can easily group these values into “metaobjects” and streamline the custom data structure.
For example, a product details page might have a “Key Features” section that contains an image, description, and title. Sometimes a product might have multiple key features. This whole block of content can now be used as a repeatable metaobject, instead of separate entries.
This feature release is the one that can be a bit more difficult to visualize how exactly it’ll impact client stores, but it’s one that got the tech team at Tomorrow talking the most.
Product Bundles
There’s not a whole lot of details here just yet, but we’re very excited to hear that Shopify will be releasing their own support for product bundling.
This is one of the most common custom features we’ve built for clients over the years, (check out our case study on FIGS, or Bandier’s site for great examples) and while we love building bundle experiences, we believe that having Shopify own the configuration and admin experience will allow us to build even better bundle experiences moving forward.
We’re eagerly anticipating the early access and release of this feature, and you can request to be included in the Shopify Bundles Early Access Sign Up.
More Checkout Extensions & Functions
Shopify’s rollout of checkout extensions continues, with more elements of this feature reaching public release. And we’re continuing to see even more good use cases for extensions and functions.
One of the most exciting announcements for our tech team regarding Functions in the Winter Editions, is the newly released Javascript support.
When Shopify first announced Functions, we were incredibly excited—then we saw that we would have to write them using Rust and Web Assembly. While we all love learning new programming languages, we were hopeful there would be a change that brought this work more in line with Shopify’s other custom development frameworks—and this new release delivered exactly that.
Increased API rate limits
Many of the clients we work with have had to request ongoing API rate limit increases from Shopify in order to address their custom needs.
We’re incredibly excited to see that Shopify has recognized that some businesses can have higher needs when it comes to API requests, and will be making it easier for enterprise brands to support their scale moving forward. This is just one of many Commerce Component releases highlighted here, but it’s one that our dev team knows will make an immediate impact.