Theme Developer Docs
Build storefront themes for Cartisto with Liquid, the Theme SDK, and the CLI.
Cartisto storefronts are rendered with Liquid templates and enhanced by a platform-owned JavaScript SDK. As a theme developer you own the presentation — markup, styling, layout, motion — while the platform owns all commerce behavior (cart, checkout, pricing, offers). That split is the single idea this whole portal is built around.
The one rule A feature must never require editing every theme. If a bugfix or a new offer type forces you to touch template logic in five themes, that logic was on the wrong side of the line — it belongs to the platform SDK, not the theme.
Start here
- Getting started — fork a theme, run the CLI, ship a change.
- Platform vs. theme — what you own, what the platform owns, and why.
- File structure — every folder in a theme and what it does.
The building blocks
| You want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Output store data in a page | Liquid objects + filters |
| Add cart / wishlist / variant behavior | SDK controllers & components |
| React to a cart or variant change | Events |
| Edit + publish from your own editor | The CLI |
| Understand what blocks a publish | Quality gate |
| Keep merchants safe across updates | Versioning & releases |
Two kinds of theme
- Platform themes — the curated marketplace themes. Liquid on disk, settings and sections customizable by merchants, code locked.
- Custom themes — a merchant’s own fork of the starter, fully code-editable through the dashboard editor or the CLI. See Custom themes.
Everything renders through the same sandboxed Liquid engine, so the contract below is identical for both.