math-ecen / shopify-recipes Goto Github PK

The Shopify Partner Slack is a free and publically available community Slack workplace for the broader Partner community to get support with (among other things) API and Theme issues. Although the workplace is free and over time URLs will no longer be accessible, as a good practice - go back through the Slack to link relevant demos against the relevant threads which inspired them if it a post did.

To make this repo more accessible to non-developers or more technical merchants and store staff who might want to use the information in this repo without necessarily having the technical knowledge or development environment handy to do so, the repo will also have a website analog: Shopify Tech Tips.

Shopify Tech Tips will be a Docusaurs site created to host a blog for miscellaneous posts and tutorials as well as structured documentation for the examples in the repo and more formal tutorials on how to use the Shopify tech stack to do a range of things.

Let's consider three of Shopify's best written resources:

• The Shopify Help Docs are a broad user manual for Shopify with a mixture of text, screenshots, and videos which educate a merchant at beginner through to power user functionality within the core platform.
• The Shopify Developer docs are an in depth documentation of specific API and technical information which a developer can put to work in their code.
• The Shopify Blog is a written part of Shopify's content strategy which provides light touch education on a myriad of topics that act as case studies and inspiration for aspirational merchants.

Each resource is great at what it does. The first two segment less technical and non-technical users from developers and offer each a reference on how to use the tools within their grasp to use Shopify. The last resource is an excellent one for Shopify's content marketing strategy but also awesome in that it brings the focus back to businesses that are using Shopify in practice.

Where Shopify Tech Tips could be powerful is in extending and linking to these resources but approaching it from the point of view of a potential or current power user. Someone who can articulate what they want, and have attempted as a power user to make their vision happen.

In summary, the new site should focus on being practical, focused on adding value to businesses, and offering context for power users on how Shopify underlying tech works which as a developer we can get through the dev docs but isn't approachable for power users and non-technical mechants.

We can get functionality that is low hanging fruit from apps in the Shopify App Store, update and extend the merchant-facing unsupported tutorials, and simplify developer oriented tutorials to be more power-user approachable.

Recipe Repo Vision & Structure

Need to decide how to structure and scope this repo so it will be most impactful to a developer or Shopify merchant that stumbles upon it and decides they want to implement directly or take inspiration from an example. The repo should also have a pathway for someone who is relatively new to Shopify to be able to pick up examples quickly and understand the structure of Shopify from a developer point of view.

Whether it's someone who is looking for a common quick fix like say adding Pre-Orders or Custom Fields to a Shopify Product, or it's someone who is hired to work on a Shopify store or by a Shopify Agency who needs to quickly get familiar with Shopify technologies through examples - this repo is a great starting point for them.

What Shopify technologies are within scope of the repo?

Everything. I suspect the Admin API and Theme's APIs will be the most popular as they have a large surface area. It would also be amazing to get examples of lesser known or publicized APIs like Kit, Flow, Marketing Activities, POS Apps, Storefront, and more.

Is business coaching within scope of the repo?

Somewhat. This repo should go beyond just API examples and proofs of concept and be relatable to actual merchant needs. This means that every example should have some business use case and that as more use cases for examples surface and the examples themselves evolve, that the recipes evolve and this is related back to how this helps a merchant to make money.

Community roadmap

Ideally every good open source project builds a thriving community in which developers and lay people can collaborate on problems. Many Shopify communities already exist with sometimes broad and sometimes specialized scopes.

In time it would be good to do one based of the examples in this repo but instead of being a general catch all question community it would be cool to have one rooted in Shopify's API & technology. The assumption being that the community is built from those looking to extend the core functionality in Shopify using it's APIs.