This major release adds significant refinement and additional control to the Align theme and fixes priority issues which have been reported by our customers (thank you, all!)
We've added powerful new theme, section, and block settings throughout the theme, and we've added some great new templates showing off the power and flexibility of Align. We're also excited to launch an overhaul of our mini-cart and cart system, which will provide better performance, easier customization, and better compatibility with third-party apps.
(Oh, and we did a top-to-bottom JavaScript audit and reduced our scripts and dependencies by over 50%! And we introduced a small-but-mighty navigation setting to help create centered-style header layouts! And much more! We've been busy!)
This release also includes our second major round of localization support, including support for Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, and Portuguese languages (👋 🇨🇳 🇳🇱 🇯🇵 🇵🇹 🇧🇷). This is in addition to the key EU languages we added in our previous major release (👋 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇮🇹 🇱🇹 🇪🇸).
This is Align's third major release, and our sixth overall since Align went live. Please reference the changelog to learn about everything included in v1.2!
We'd once again like to thank our customers for your trust and patience in our work. As always, we are here to help and we welcome your feedback! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any/all questions, comments, or concerns. Your feedback is helping to build a better theme.
Added
- "Natura" style preset and demo store
- Page templates: About, Hero, Home page, Landing 01, and Landing 02
- Collection templates: Basic, Featured subcollection, Hero with background, No banners, and With promos
- Blog templates: Documentation, Landing 01
- Article template: Documentation
- Theme setting for the action performed after a product is added to cart: open the mini-cart drawer, update the icon in the header, or redirect to cart page automatically (Theme settings > Cart > "Add to cart style")
- Theme setting to choose sitewide card hover effects (Theme settings > Cards > "Show box shadow", "Show image filter on hover", "Scale on hover")
- Theme setting to set a default image to be used in page, product, article, or collection cards instead of the default Shopify image placeholder (Theme settings > Cards > "Default image")
- Theme setting to change the Add to cart button style in the product cards, or to hide it completely (Theme settings > Cards > "Button style")
- Theme setting to display or hide the product price from the product cards sitewide (Theme settings > Cards > "Show price")
- Theme setting for LinkedIn URL, which will display the icon alongside other social media icons sitewide (Theme settings > Social media > "LinkedIn url")
- Section settings to change the header and footer background, text, and icon colors (Main navigation, Footer navigation)
- Section setting in the “Product information” section to change the column widths on desktop devices (Product information section > "Column width")
- Section setting to align text and content in the Hero section
- Section and block settings to hide the video controls in all video sections and blocks
- Section and block settings to display blog posts from a selected blog or article in the Accordion section and block
- Section setting to choose the number of columns for tablet screen sizes for Slideshow and Multicolumn sections
- Block setting to pin any Main navigation block to the center of the section
- Block setting in Accordion blocks to display a button inside of the accordion
- Block setting to disable predictive search in the header and hero section search blocks (Search block > "Show predictive results window")
- Block setting a footer block in a new column (Footer navigation > block > "Show in new column")
- Block setting to display a footer block in a new row (Footer navigation > block > "Show in new row")
- Block setting to align the footer block content
- Block setting to display custom images in a Testimonial block
- New blog post footer section with more controls and better UI to showcase author, post date, tags and share/print icons
Improved
- Lots of miscellaneous mobile, layout, and style polish throughout! 💎🧐
- Refined default settings throughout all sections and blocks
- Overhauled mini-cart and cart page rendering using the Shopify Section Rendering API for better performance, easier customization, and better compatibility with third-party apps
- Improved performance and load times by reducing CSS file size and removing certain JavaScript dependencies
- Improved the handling of lazy/eager loaded images using the latest upgrades from Shopify
- Better styling of various WYSIWYG editor, hero, icon, text, and button elements
- Polished the styling for ordered and unordered lists for better nested list support
- Updated the placement of the “view all” button in the megamenu when there are more than three menu columns
- Improved the handling of certain theme color settings when transparent colors are selected
- Add to cart buttons now use translation JSON files instead of the block setting
- Changed the Twitter logo to X
- Removed grayscale from linked logo blocks
- Better 404 page layout and customization settings
- Pagination layout and style
- Better support for products with a 3D model as primary media
Fixed
- Miscellaneous edge cases for theme color settings
- Cart price display issue which prevented the display of “amount_no_decimals” setting
- Cart issue related to products with automated discounts
- Testimonial section image size issue
- Features bar default icon color issue
- Flashing of related product tooltips on initial load of a blog post
