Print Connect and your theme

Print Connect's Page builder designs your store's pages, the way Shopify's theme editor does: your home page, product and collection pages, pages, blogs and blog posts, cart, search, password and 404 pages, and your header and footer, each with your theme's own sections and Print Connect's. Where Shopify allows it, Print Connect writes the pages you publish into your live theme. This page lists everything it adds or changes there, and how to take it all out again.

Where it doesn't write your theme, your pages show through Print Connect's app block instead, which you add to each template in Shopify's theme editor. Then nothing on this page applies: Print Connect adds no files to your theme, and uninstalling it removes what the block shows.

What Print Connect puts in your theme

• Its own sections, in sections/print-connect-*.liquid, their styles, in assets/print-connect-pages.css and assets/print-connect-brand.css, and a small script for its slideshow's arrows and its tabs, in assets/print-connect-pages.js.
• The templates of the pages you publish in the Page builder, and only those. Each type of page has its own: templates/index.json, templates/product.json, templates/collection.json, templates/list-collections.json, templates/page.json, templates/blog.json, templates/article.json, templates/cart.json, templates/search.json, templates/password.json and templates/404.json. Products, collections, pages, blogs and blog posts can also have other templates, like templates/page.contact.json: your theme's own, or ones you make in Print Connect. Before it first writes over one of your theme's templates, Print Connect keeps an exact copy of it, to put back.
• Your header and footer, if you publish them in the Page builder: your theme's sections/header-group.json and sections/footer-group.json. These are kept first too.
• Preview copies of your pages, from Preview in the Page builder, named for the type of page, like templates/index.print-connect-preview.json and templates/product.print-connect-preview.json. Nothing uses them, and Print Connect deletes each one a day after it was made.
• The template your products, collections, pages, blogs and blog posts use, where you choose them for one of your templates (“Used for” in the Page builder). Print Connect records the template each one had, to put it back, and never moves one you've since moved to another template in Shopify.

It doesn't change your theme's settings, colors, layout, languages or theme blocks, or any of your theme's own sections, snippets or styles. If you change one of your pages in Shopify's theme editor, Print Connect asks you before publishing over it. While its sections are in your theme, Shopify offers each theme update for you to apply instead of applying it automatically.

Before a page first goes into your theme, publishing lists every file it changes there, with exactly what it writes, and asks you first. Once you've started a page in the Page builder (your first change to it starts it), its menu (…) shows the same: What publishing changes in your theme. Afterwards, the theme menu's What's in your theme lists every file Print Connect wrote, what it kept to put back, and each change it made.

Taking it out with Print Connect

• One page: open it in the Page builder and choose Put your theme's own page back from its menu (…). Your theme's template goes back exactly as it was. For a template you made in Print Connect, choose Take off store: it's deleted, and anything that used it goes back to the template it had. Either way, your design is kept.
• Everything: in the Page builder's theme menu, choose Remove from my theme. Every template Print Connect wrote goes back exactly as it was, its own sections, styles and templates are deleted, and your products, collections and pages go back to the templates they had. Your pages then show through Print Connect's app block, if you add it in the theme editor. If you've added one of its sections to another page in Shopify's theme editor, that section stays, and Print Connect tells you where.

Do this before uninstalling Print Connect: once it's uninstalled, it can't change your store.

Taking it out by hand

If Print Connect is already uninstalled, or can no longer change your theme:

• Your templates, header and footer: in Shopify, go to Online Store → Themes → … → Edit code, open each file Print Connect wrote and choose an older version from before Print Connect (Shopify keeps a file's earlier versions). Or rebuild the page in the theme editor.
• Products, collections, pages, blogs and blog posts on your templates: in each one's page in the Shopify admin, set “Theme template” back to the one it had (usually Default).
• The files: in Edit code, delete every sections/print-connect-*.liquid file, assets/print-connect-pages.css, assets/print-connect-brand.css, assets/print-connect-pages.js, any templates/*.print-connect-preview.json, and any template you made in Print Connect that nothing uses now. Remove any Print Connect section you placed on other pages first. Earlier versions of Print Connect made templates/product.print-connect.json, templates/collection.print-connect.json and templates/page.print-connect-about.json: delete those too, if they're there.

Nothing breaks if you leave them: the sections don't need Print Connect to show, so your pages keep working until you change them.