[thezoid]

There are a number of approaches you can take for this. Many developers simply have a production and staging store. Another approach is to have a production and staging theme which you can preview.

The shopify_theme[1] gem or the new theme sync tool[2] help keep synchronization quick. I can see the problem in the lack of context objects that are available to a theme, and there was even a tool a long time ago that solved that.

Sadly, it was very difficult to keep in sync.

[1] https://github.com/shopify/shopify_theme [2] https://github.com/csaunders/phoenix