Seed
Seed is Shopline's reference theme, built for performance, flexibility and ease of use. It uses Online Store 2.0 features including support for app blocks on all pages and JSON templates. Seed serves as the foundation for all free Shopline themes.
Seed is an ultra-lightweight, mobile-first theme that utilizes atomic components, minimal JavaScript and a thoughtful feature set. It maximizes merchant flexibility while minimizing complexity.
We have developed a set of best practices and used them to build Seed:
- Performance - Every part of Seed is built with performance in mind. Multiple strategies are employed to optimize performance such as using CSS wherever possible and native browser functionality to reduce bundle size and shorten load times.
- Design - Seed was built based on experience from merchants and customers alike. It combines flexibility and ease-of-use with strong brand expression and intuitive interfaces.
- Use of Sections & Blocks - By breaking template functionality into sections & blocks, Seed provides flexibility when building templates. This allows merchants to construct custom layouts on any page.
Using Seed
The following table describes guidelines we offer developers who wish to use Seed:
| Allowed | Not Allowed |
|---|---|
| - Clone and customize Seed for your store or your client's store - Explore best practices with Seed to learn about theme development best practices - Explore Seed components and functionality implementations - Use Seed components in your own themes or your client's themes | - Selling Seed, customized versions of it, or any of its components on third-party websites or platforms. |
Exploring Example Theme Components
The Shopline theme architecture is highly flexible and can be implemented in different ways to support your merchant goals, or meet specific merchant segment market needs.
If you are unfamiliar with Shopline themes or want to understand how certain architectural components are used, you can explore component implementation in Seed.
Because JSON templates have been provided by seed for all its pages, you can use them as models when adding sections into your own theme (see JSON templates).
If a component is implemented in seed then its implementation is linked from the component documentation.
Cloning & Building With Seed
You may use seed as a starting point when building out your own theme. If you're developing themes using Shopline CLI, then you may clone the repository onto your local machine using the init command. You may also clone seed directly from the repository.
This process is documented within our Creating a Theme tutorial.
