Shopify Theme Developer Roadmap

Is Shopify a well-equipped platform for development? What do you need to know to create Shopify Themes? Let’s check it out!

Hello everybody! In this article, I’ll tell you my story about Shopify Development, how I started, how it goes, and my plans for it. Also, you will learn the Shopify developer roadmap based on my experience.

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I’m a Shopify Developer

I’ve 4 years of experience in front-end development. I had a job in a digital agency where worked as a Shopify developer for one year. I made a lot of Shopify stores and customizations, and now I’ve enough experience with it.

If you want to be a Shopify developer you have to create a Shopify partner account. What is that?

Shopify partner account

To work with themes you need to create a partner account to open a development store and use Shopify for free. Also, you can use beta features and try new content.

What is Shopify?

I wrote about Shopify in one of my Medium articles. If you don't read it yet, I kindly recommend to do so:

How I met Shopify

I learned some CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, etc. I saw that Shopify is so popular and I wanted to check what is it. I saw a lot of videos and read some articles about Dropshipping, Liquid, the Shopify platform, and other. And my interest in a lot of CMS during those days helped me to find a full-time job.

How I started working on Shopify as a developer

One IT company made me an offer on the Shopify Developer position and I get it. I worked on a third-party themes and did a lot of code customizations. Sometimes it took a lot of time because something just broke, I mean was broken in a theme. And I fixed it.

After that, I started to read Shopify documentation to understand how to make lightweight functional themes. I saw that Shopify websites can be nice, I thought the Shopify stores can be heavy only and not so cool for users because the page loading speed is nah. So, what about Shopify development? I checked Shopify Theme Development only because I’m interested in websites first.

Shopify Developer Roadmap

Shopify Basics

In this grade, you need a minimum knowledge of Web Development. One thing you need to know is computer basics. You will edit websites in the admin panel called customizer. You can edit the theme code if you wish to. For code editing you’ll need to know:

• HTML
• CSS
• Basic JavaScript
• jQuery
• JSON
• Liquid
• Shopify platform.

Shopify Theme Developer

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• JS Framework (React.js or Vue.js)
• Shopify Platform
• Shopify APIs
• Liquid
• GraphQL. So it can be kind of complex to learn all of these shortly, but it will take some time as everything is when you are learning new technologies. You can read more on official Shopify development documentation.

Shopify Plus Developer

• Shopify Platform
• Liquid
• Shopify Plus Apps
• Script Editor (Ruby)
• Shopify Headless CMS (Storefront API)
• Framework (Hydrogen or Next JS)
• GraphQL.

jQuery is used in old themes, if you have a fresh theme no needs to know it.

Overall

In this article, you understood what you need to know to work as a Shopify developer.

If you want to get a Shopify store for your start-up or business you can hire me as a professional Shopify developer.