The Quality Gate

Every publish runs through the Quality Gate — the same rules in three places so they can never drift: the CLI’s theme validate, the test suite, and the server’s publish endpoint. If the gate fails, the publish is rejected with an itemized error and the live store keeps serving the last good version.

Tier 1 — deterministic (blocks publish)

Check	What it enforces
Theme contract	Banned patterns are absent (see below) and layout.liquid outputs the three required tags.
SDK version	theme.json declares a known "sdk" contract version.
Section catalog	Every section your theme.json declares ships its partial at views/sections/<path>.liquid — a declared-but-missing section would 500 the page when placed.
Release pinning	Release snapshots are well-formed and correctly versioned (see Versioning).
i18n completeness	Every locale has the same key set — no half-translated strings.
Bundle budget	Storefront JS stays under the per-page byte budget.

Banned patterns

The contract rejects markup/JS that reintroduces platform behavior a theme may not own:

• fetch( / salla. — call cartisto.*, never the API directly.
• Hardcoded platform <script src> — the platform injects those.
• Pre-namespace element names — use <cartisto-add-to-cart> / <cartisto-wishlist> / <cartisto-auth-modal>.
• The old listing engine, addToWishlist, changeMainImage, "cartUpdated", bare window.productData / window.storeTheme — all replaced by platform seams.

Required layout tags

layout.liquid must output {{ platform_head }}, {{ content }}, and {{ platform_body }}. Miss one and the storefront loses SEO, the SDK, or the page body — so the gate refuses to save it.

Tier 2 — quality signals (live-store checks)

Run against a live store (the platform runs these; you can too):

• Accessibility — axe audits of home, listing, PDP, and the cart drawer; fails on serious/critical.
• RTL — no horizontal overflow under dir=rtl at mobile/tablet/desktop.
• Performance — LCP / CLS / TBT budgets under mobile-lab throttling.

Running it yourself

cartisto theme validate        # Tier 1, offline, over your local files