New dynamic theme layouts allow for content sections across your entire site.
This new toolkit exposes expanded support for visual control beyond what was previously possible.
Prior to this update, merchants and developers had the ability to build content blocks on the homepage, but were more limited with the rest of their site, such as on general content pages, product details, and category listings.
Historically this has forced merchants to build hybrid sites in order to augment what was possible in Shopify’s prior toolkit. These other CMS platforms like Craft CMS, ExpressionEngine, and WordPress would then be called to augment what Shopify could do.
With the launch of Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 template system, we can now build rich content areas living entirely in the Shopify platform.
This will consolidate management for visually rich Shopify merchants from potentially 2 platforms back to 1. This will result in speed increases by reducing the calls to an external system, and will simplify management of your site's content by eliminating the need to work in a separate admin dashboard for your content pages.
There are a few ways merchants can get their store updated to support Online Store 2.0: Upgrade your store to an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme, or migrate a custom theme manually to the new format.