Themes and front-end
Metaobjects
Metaobjects are content types you define inside Shopify, with their own fields: a size guide, a material, a store location, an author. They exist in their own right, are referenced from products or pages through a metafield, and the theme renders them like any other object.
Also called: metaobject, structured content, custom content types
The difference from a metafield is ownership. A metafield describes an object that already exists. A metaobject is an object: it stands alone, it is edited once, and many products use it.
When it is worth it
The test is simple: does this data repeat across several products, and when it changes do you have to change it in all of them? If yes, it is a metaobject.
The cases I meet most:
- A size guide shared by a whole product family.
- Materials or compositions, with a name, a description and an icon.
- Store locations, with address and opening hours, for a stockists page.
- Certifications, which carry a logo and legal text.
The real benefit is not technical: the client edits it once and it updates on 200 product pages, without touching the theme.
What to plan for
Two things. First, a metaobject can have its own URL if you give it one, at which point it becomes indexable content; decide that on purpose rather than by accident. Second, the theme has to render it: a metaobject with no section to display it is data nobody sees.
And the usual warning: metaobjects are not a database. If what you want is a 50,000-row catalog with search, this is not it.
Documentation: metaobjects.