Exploring Liquid: Shopify’s Open-Source Templating Language

Liquid is an open-source templating language created by Shopify to dynamically customize web page themes on e-commerce platforms like Shopify. It’s designed to be intuitive, flexible, and powerful, enabling developers to create highly customized templates to best suit the online shopping experience to the specific needs of stores and their customers.

What is Liquid?

Liquid is a templating language that allows developers to embed logic and dynamic variables into HTML templates. It consists of variables, tags, and filters that manipulate data and control the flow of code within templates. Liquid is particularly popular among developers working with Shopify, but it can also be used in other contexts to customize and make web pages dynamic.

Key Features of Liquid:

– Objects: Objects in Liquid are used to represent dynamic data such as product names, prices, images, and more. They can be manually defined or provided by the system as part of store data. Example:

– Tags: Tags in Liquid allow performing operations like loops, conditions, file inclusion, and more in templates. Tags are delimited by {% %} and can be used to control code flow and generate dynamic content. Example:

– Filters: Filters in Liquid allow manipulating and formatting data in various ways. They can be used to modify text, format dates, perform calculations, and more. Example:

Using Liquid on Shopify:

Liquid is natively integrated into Shopify and widely used to customize online store themes on this platform. Developers can create Liquid templates for pages such as the home page, product pages, category pages, and more. By using Liquid, it’s possible to make all elements of the store dynamic and highly customized, including layout, content, and functionality.

Complete Example:

Here’s a complete example of how a Liquid template on Shopify might look, including variables, tags, and filters:

This template displays the product title and price, checks if the product is available, and shows a brief product description truncated to 100 characters.

Conclusion:

Liquid is a powerful and flexible tool that provides developers with the ability to create dynamic templates for web pages on Shopify and other platforms. With its intuitive syntax and numerous features, Liquid makes it easy to customize and adapt online stores to the specific needs of store owners and their customers.

Links:

Shopify: official website (https://www.shopify.com/it)

Liquid: github repo (https://shopify.github.io/liquid/)

Docs Dev Shopify Liquid: tags, filters, objects ( https://shopify.dev/docs/api/liquid )