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Tread Documentation

Theme documentation

This folder documents every editable area of the theme, in plain language, so anyone editing the store in the Shopify theme editor knows what each setting does. It’s written for reference — drop it into a documentation app, wiki, or knowledge base as-is.

How the theme editor works

Section titled “How the theme editor works”

Everything you can change lives in Online Store → Themes → Customize. There are two kinds of controls:

  • Theme settings — the paint bucket icon in the bottom-left of the editor sidebar. These are global: they affect the whole store (fonts, colors, spacing, button style, product/collection/blog card behaviour, and so on). See General settings.
  • Sections and blocks — added to individual templates (home page, product page, collection page, etc.) in the main editor panel. A section is a full-width row on the page (a banner, a product grid, a slideshow). Most sections can hold blocks — smaller repeatable pieces inside the section (a heading, a button, an image, one slide, one FAQ item). Click a section or block in the sidebar to reveal its settings on the right.

A few sections are special because they aren’t part of a normal page — they’re documented individually:

  • Header — the site header, logo and navigation.
  • Footer — the footer and its content blocks.
  • Announcement bar — the bar above the header.
  • Popup — promotional popups (newsletter sign-up, sales, etc.).
  • Cart drawer — the slide-out cart.
  • Search drawer — the slide-out search panel.

Every other section — banners, grids, carousels, the product page, the collection page, etc. — is documented in All sections.

Blocks like Heading, Subheading, Rich text, Button, and Newsletter appear inside many different sections. Rather than repeat them everywhere, they’re documented once in Shared content blocks, and each section page links to that instead of repeating the same fields.

Contents

Section titled “Contents”

General tips

Section titled “General tips”
  • Changes in the theme editor are only saved to the live store when you click Save. Anything you try out before that is a preview only.
  • Most color, spacing and sizing controls use color schemes, set once in General settings and then picked per-section — this keeps every part of the site consistent. Change the scheme’s colors in one place and every section using it updates together.
  • Settings that only appear once you turn something on (e.g. a “show once per user” checkbox that reveals a follow-up option) are marked as conditional below — they’re hidden until the setting they depend on is enabled.
  • If a setting looks missing from a section, check whether it’s actually a block setting — click the block itself (not the section) in the left-hand list to see it.