I’m not familiar with shopify but I’m about to start a shopify project for a client.
Can you elaborate on what the difference is between Hydrogen and a custom theme? Other than the tooling and template language I’m struggling to understand the conceptual differences.
Hydrogen is essentially a headless storefront, you have complete control over how your storefront is rendered, but it does come with boilerplate and helpers for some standard primitives that most people will want (e.g. carts).
Custom themes allow you to template on top of the Shopify front end, giving you less control.
If liquid is what you know and love, 100% stick with it. Liquid isn't going away, and there are plenty of opportunities to build out liquid storefronts. Hydrogen is built for custom storefronts that need more flexibility than what is available in a liquid theme. It's entirely customizable. Hydrogen has better performance capabilities as well, because it can be stream rendered to the client.
"Why shouldn't I stick to server side rendered pages?"
Hydrogen is still server rendered. Server components themselves never execute in the browser.
Hi! Great work so far. Does the team have a vision for a way to standardize the front-end part of shopify apps? That seems to be the really tricky part of a appstore-based platform going headless.
Hi, do you think is the right time to start developing an ecommerce with Hydrogen? It sounds you're still in a beta phase where api may change frequently.
Can you elaborate on what the difference is between Hydrogen and a custom theme? Other than the tooling and template language I’m struggling to understand the conceptual differences.