Asking for a friend: how hard/expensive is it to port a theme from a custom CMS to Shopify? Nothing special: home page, about page, product pages. Just the frontend. ISTM it should be ~3 days of dev work? Some freelancers are acting like anything but tweaking an existing theme is rocket science. - ThreadSky

filippo.abyssdomain.expert • 3 days ago

Asking for a friend: how hard/expensive is it to port a theme from a custom CMS to Shopify?

Nothing special: home page, about page, product pages. Just the frontend.

ISTM it should be ~3 days of dev work? Some freelancers are acting like anything but tweaking an existing theme is rocket science.

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mattadvance.bsky.social•3 days ago

The straightforward parts go very quickly but you have to have experience for the edge cases that turn into a timesink. Also an understand of what the client really wants (and how they often *don't* want an exact pixel-perfect mirror)

rreverser.com•3 days ago

That sounds like a thing AI could automate. It doesn't replace real development yet, but reshaping things from one text format to another is very much within its realm.

filippo.abyssdomain.expert•3 days ago

Yeah tbh I expected this to be something where a freelancer would bill three days, use Claude to do most of the work, and be done in one day. Which would be fine!

briansmith.bsky.social•3 days ago

Probably for 90%+ it could be like that, regardless of AI. But there’s no way to tell how long the rest will take to get it “perfect enough,” nor to exactly meet the customer’s unknown expectations. Just like we’d expect a decision about programming language syntax to go.

zaql.bsky.social•3 days ago

It depends on the theme. I could help you look into it. What do you think?

0xfab10.bsky.social•3 days ago

It could take 3 days if everything goes smoothly. There are rules that you just can't bend with Shopify / liquid. For example, pagination can be a nightmare. But if the translation to liquid is easy, a week seems reasonable.

centerorbit.bsky.social•3 days ago

I was going to add that all of the experienced Shopify devs know that it's never "just template and styling"... there's all sorts of porting nuances that can just suck the l̶i̶f̶e̶ time right out of you.

0xfab10.bsky.social•3 days ago

Let's start from the assumption that the only correct answer is "It depends" 😁

rainofclones.bsky.social•3 days ago

Top 2 questions would be:
1) does client care about pixel perfect correspondence
2) how similar is the underlying HTML put out by the theme on custom CMS and the target theme on Shopify.
If 1:YES, 2:"not that similar" might think of starting from scratch as bit "port cute octopus costume to my kid"

rainofclones.bsky.social•3 days ago

If client not too fussy about pixel perfect & HTML structures are very similar (clean semantic HTML & not lots of nested DIV elements) then might be more: port this male costume to a similarly sized woman, must tweak a bit but structures are similar and client not to fussy.

rainofclones.bsky.social•3 days ago

Other thing to understand: a modern theme not really 1 layout but 3, maybe 4. Mobile first, mid-size (tablets) and desktop, then as 4th: HiDPI versions. If you have a lot of fancy effects and not too similar structures it may be like: "which leg of the octopus corresponds to the kid's arm?"

filippo.abyssdomain.expert•3 days ago

I thought Shopify themes allowed templating the HTML as well? So it’d be a matter of replacing the product info and the URL scheme. The theme is already responsive.

rainofclones.bsky.social•3 days ago

That's a relevant point: if it is a responsive & fairly modern theme then getting the HTML output by the template on Shopify to match that of the custom CMS would be a relatively simple way forward & increase chances of the existing theme working exactly as designed without lots of CSS tweaks.

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