Hello hello, friends of Weaverse,
There’s this thought experiment I’d love to bring up whenever we talk about websites: The Ship of Theseus. It's that old brain teaser where if you replace every single piece of a ship, you've got to wonder – is it still the same ship?
Well, we think websites are kind of like that. Just like Theseus's ship, your website is ever-evolving, constantly changing pieces through updates, redesigns, and content swaps. But at its core, does it remain uniquely yours?
It should be, and page builders/theme customizers should help, by making things reusable, modular, and uniform. So, no matter how many times you flip, switch, or swap elements on your site, your website remains uniquely yours.
This month’s update is all about reusability in Weaverse. But first, let’s get to the usual part. :)
The Best Writing About Headless, WebDev, and Everything In Between
In the same way, Leo Tolstoy said “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, I said, “All good headless builds are alike, each bad headless build is bad in its own way”.
It’s true, there are almost as many ways you can f*ck up your headless implementation as how you implement headless correctly. This is why learning - not just about headless, but web dev in general - is important, and here is what I read recently:
Sorry Shopify Theme Block, We’re Here First!
Shopify Theme Blocks is one of the most exciting and long-awaited releases from Winter 2024, and it certainly lives up to hype.
Shopify Theme blocks allow you to define a block once and then reuse it across sections to eliminate redundant work and coding and make them more consistent. Theme blocks allow for increased layout flexibility and finer-grain control over styling, enabling merchants and developers to build the exact vision they have for their brand.
Of course, I’d be a lot more excited, if not for the fact Weaverse has already had our own theme block since the beginning :) We call it Components.
With Weaverse Components, developers can define schema settings not only at the Section level but also at the Blocks level. You can then leverage the best of React (and Hydrogen, by extension) - define components at the atomic level, reuse them everywhere, everytime, and easily implement a design system into your project.
Custom Page URL and Custom Page Template
With Shopify, you can’t remove resource markers like pages , or blogs. It’s a minor issue, but strangely enough, it has been one of the most annoying issues with Shopify.
Merchants have complained about this. They want control over URL structure to create their own taxonomy. This is particularly important when it comes to SEO and advertising:
In advertising - like Google Ads or Facebook ads, the preference is always to link to yoursite.com/maypromo rather than yoursite.com/pages/maypromo.
In SEO, link optimization and link depth are important for ranking.
Workaround suggested. Requests submitted. 08 pages of merchants’ complaints, 04 years, and 167 replies later. There’s still no update.
As a developer and product manager, I understand - there are always more prioritized features. Issues like this might easily fall off Product Managers’ radars. So we want to make it one step easier: If you have a Shopify Hydrogen store, you can easily create custom URLs for custom pages in Weaverse, using our visual page builder.
Simple as that!
That's all for this month's newsletter. Stay safe, and see you around!
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