Changelog

Developer-facing changes to the theme contract, the API, and the platform. Dates are release dates; pre-launch entries may still change.

2026-08 — Money-path & theme lifecycle hardening

• Checkout is fully platform-rendered. The locked checkout and order-confirmation pages now render their body and their layout from platform-owned templates — the active theme’s layout.liquid, its <script> tags, and any merchant custom JS no longer run on the payment surface. Themes still brand checkout through the compiled stylesheet and design tokens (logo, fonts, accent). No action needed by themes.
• Honest view pinning. Theme release versions now pin merchant installs by minor line: patch changes are evergreen (reach the whole fleet), while minor/major changes are frozen behind a release snapshot until a merchant applies the update. New theme:release tooling and a Release pinning Quality Gate check. See Theme versioning.
• Custom-fork lifecycle. A custom theme now records the starter version it was forked from. The starter fallback and “reset to starter” resolve against the fork’s own era (not whatever the current starter is), and the dashboard surfaces a “starter update available” signal. See Custom themes.

2026-08 — Documentation Center

• Launched the four-portal Documentation Center: Merchant, Theme Developer, App & API, and Platform Reference.

Earlier — Theme platform foundation

• All-Liquid storefront. Every theme — platform and custom — renders through one sandboxed Liquid engine. The t, image_url, money_format, and lang_path filters, SSR pagination, and Shopify-style globals (routes, shop, settings) landed here.
• Draft / publish + file history. Customizer and code edits write to a draft; publishing promotes through the Quality Gate; every file keeps revisions with rollback.
• The Quality Gate. One deterministic contract (banned patterns, required layout tags, i18n parity, bundle budget) enforced in the CLI, the tests, and the publish path so they can’t drift, plus Tier-2 a11y / RTL / performance checks.
• The component library. cartisto-* custom elements (bundles, add-to-cart, wishlist, auth modal, cart drawer, quantity, toast, modal) so shared behavior ships once, not per theme.
• The Theme CLI & Theme Access. @cartisto/cli (init/pull/dev/diff/validate/ push/publish) plus scoped Theme Access keys for outside developers.
• Multi-install & versioning. A tenant can hold several installs of one theme (seasonal variants); each platform install snapshots its settings schema and pins a version.