Introduction

A high-level overview of concepts that you need to understand in order to develop your Live Editor theme.

A Live Editor theme lays the foundation for the entire website:

  • Layouts define the base HTML markup and editable regions that pages within the site will reference.
  • Content templates allow you to define structured content and mark up how the data should be displayed in one or many different scenarios.
  • Navigation menus can be marked up and structured however you want.

Note: Because content templates are so structural in nature, Live Editor themes generally aren’t portable across sites. This may be a little different than your understanding of how “themes” work in different CMS systems.

Live Editor aims to stay out of your way as much as possible while you’re developing your website’s theme. You can develop the theme on your own local computer with whatever code editor, build tools, front end frameworks, libraries, and development workflows that you want.

Templating logic is provided by the Liquid scripting language, developed and maintained by the makers of Shopify e-commerce software.

To help with the development and maintenance of themes, we provide a simple command-line-based tool called Live Editor CLI.

Next steps

Ready to get started? Let’s go ahead and set up your development environment.