[Feature]: Facilitate a way to separate theme code from content / settings

[nboliver-ventureweb]

What area(s) will this request affect?

Theme

What type of change do you want to see?

New feature

Overview

The existing theme architecture is designed around a 1:1 relationship between a theme / repo and a store. This creates substantial challenges managing themes for Plus / enterprise merchants, who often run multiple expansion stores to facilitate D2C / B2B / multi-region, etc. CI/CD becomes complex and it is too easy to overwrite published content when manually managing multiple stores via the CLI.

There should be a way to separate theme settings and content (ie. .json files) from code, so that a single repository can be used to manage multiple stores, without the need for complex branch strategies and so on.

The Shopkeeper CLI does an excellent job of facilitating this, but unfortunately it does not work with newer versions of the Shopify CLI due to the removal of key dependencies in Shopify CLI.

While a third party tool is a great approach (until required dependencies become unpublished), the best case scenario would be if the Shopify CLI could support something like this out of the box.

Motivation

Excess time spent managing deployments to multiple stores from the same theme. This feels like something that should be easy, but in fact is difficult / cumbersome to set up.

When working with Sanity, it is so easy to switch between different environments that leverage the same codebase. I hope the same can be true for Shopify themes one day.