Shopify Metaobjects
Philipp Scambor
Director E-Commerce & Co-Founder @ Digit-One
They were announced with great fanfare in the Shopify Winter Editions 2023, and rightly so. Shopify Metaobjects opens up many doors for using Shopify more efficiently as a CMS. And a lot has happened since its introduction.
An overview of the new features in Shopify Metaobjects
Anyone who has been following the development of Shopify Metaobjects will have noticed that they have undergone significant updates in the 1.5 years since their official launch:
- Since the Summer 2023 edition, it has been possible to create templates for metaobjects in the theme editor. This opens up immense possibilities for using metaobjects to display standardized detail pages (e.g., person detail pages, job detail pages, and much more).
- Metaobjects are now localizable in Shopify Markets. This means that market-specific templates can be created or the content of metaobjects can be translated using apps such as Translate & Adapt.
- Better integration for apps: Webhooks for metaobject changes
- Editing metaobjects directly in the theme editor
The many new possibilities with Shopify Metaobjects
To better understand the aforementioned innovations, it is best to look at real scenarios from everyday life at Shopify. Completely new doors are opening up for editing and displaying content for the storefront in an efficient and targeted manner.
Example: (Blog) authors with detail pages
In general, it is relevant for SEO to specify the author or authors of blog posts. In addition, the trustworthiness of the content can be further enhanced for search engines if posts link to author bio pages with additional information about the person behind the post (SEO keyword E-E-A-T (https://upload-magazin.de/28510 -reputation-and-seo-how-google-evaluates-the-quality-of-content/)).
So how can we implement and design author detail pages in Shopify?
The traditional way (without using meta objects)
Basically, a classic page is created in Shopify for each author with an individual page template. This allows individual content to be stored for each author. For blog posts by the author, a link to the author's page must then be provided. The pages can then be accessed as usual at /pages/max-mustermann.
This is basically a viable solution and has been used in practice in this or a similar form.
The new approach with meta objects
A new meta object definition is created for authors, which contains all information about the authors. In a second step, a standardized template for displaying authors can then be created. Multiple authors can thus be displayed using a central template, as is also familiar from product templates. The author pages can then be accessed using the handles specified for the meta object: e.g.: /pages/author/max-mustermann.
For individual blog posts, a meta object reference could be made maintainable via a meta field. This allows the existing authors to be selected for a post and the link to the appropriate detail page to be automatically created in the blog post template from this reference.
This approach has numerous advantages, especially with regard to the further development of shops in terms of content. The creation of new content (in this case, new blog posts and, if necessary, new authors) can be separated from the presentation. This generally makes it less complicated to create new content.
Example: Displaying job postings
A scenario similar to that of the blog authors can also be drawn up for displaying job postings in the shop. Let's assume we want to display a job overview in the shop frontend that lists all open positions and links to detailed pages.
If we again consider the options available to us without meta objects, it quickly becomes clear that we have to work with the classic Shopify pages. We would have to create meta information about jobs, which could be used to filter the overview (e.g., location), as page meta fields. This would mean that these fields would appear on all pages, which would complicate maintenance.
The situation is different when we use meta objects. We can create a new type for jobs and make both the content for the job detail pages and the meta information maintainable. This makes creating and managing jobs much clearer. Furthermore, we can now create a dedicated job template that is applied to all jobs and enables us to manage the display of all jobs centrally in an efficient and simple manner. The fact that the jobs also contain meta information opens up all kinds of possibilities for us to build a job overview that can be filtered by job attributes or similar criteria.
The scenario described above can, of course, be applied in a similar way to many other applications. It shows how powerful metaobjects have become in Shopify.
Conclusion
Since their introduction with Shopify Winter Editions 2023, metaobjects have established themselves as a powerful tool in the Shopify ecosystem. Regular updates, such as the ability to create templates in the theme editor and localization for Shopify Markets, have significantly expanded their flexibility and range of applications. These developments make it possible to manage and display content more efficiently, whether for blog authors or job postings. The separation of content creation and display greatly facilitates the maintenance and further development of online stores. Shopify Metaobjects have thus taken a big step toward becoming a powerful content management system.