Publish to Shopify from Growth Calendar
Finished articles can go to your Shopify blog without any copying and pasting. Send them one at a time, have every finished article arrive as a hidden article for you to review, or let them publish themselves.
There is one setting for the whole workspace, under CMS in the top right of Growth Calendar.
What you need
The store itself, and an account that can approve app access to it. There is nothing to copy or paste: connecting takes you to Shopify, where you approve the connection and come straight back.
Timothe asks for one permission, write_content, which covers reading and writing blogs and articles. It cannot see orders, customers or products.
Connecting
- Open CMS in the top right of Growth Calendar and select Shopify.
- Enter the store address and select Connect.
- Approve the connection on the Shopify screen that opens.
The address is the .myshopify.com one, such as your-store.myshopify.com, not the domain shoppers see. Find it in the Shopify admin under Settings > Domains. Entering a custom domain is refused straight away, because the API only answers on the .myshopify.com address.
Choosing the blog
Shopify keeps articles inside a blog, so an article cannot be sent until you pick one. The picker lists the blogs on the connected store, and the settings cannot be saved while it is empty.
Most stores have a blog called News already. To add another, use Online Store > Blog posts > Manage blogs in the Shopify admin, then reopen this screen.
Everything sent from this workspace goes into the blog you pick here.
Setting the author
Shopify shows an author on every article. The Author field beside the blog picker sets it; left empty, the store's own name is used.
Changing an article's author in Shopify sticks: re-sending an article only overwrites the author when this field has been filled in.
Choosing how articles are sent
Once connected, the same screen offers three choices.
The default is Manual. Starting with manual or drafts and switching to automatic publishing once you trust the output is the safer path.
Shopify has no separate draft state for articles: an unpublished article is simply not visible in the store. It sits in Online Store > Blog posts with its visibility set to hidden, and you make it live from there.
Sending a single article
Use Publish to CMS at the top right of an article. The control next to it switches between sending it hidden and publishing immediately.
Sending the same article twice updates the existing Shopify article rather than creating a second one, so revising and re-sending never leaves duplicates behind.
About internal links
Growth Calendar links articles in the same cluster to each other. When an article is sent, links to siblings that have already been sent become their real URLs.
This works even while those siblings are still hidden: Growth Calendar works out the address the article will have once it is visible, from the store's own domain and the blog it lives in, and links to that.
Links to articles that have not been sent at all are unwrapped to plain text. A link to an address that does not exist would send readers to an error page. Work through a cluster in order and each article will link correctly to the ones before it.
If your theme changes the address articles live at, links made while a sibling is still hidden can point at the wrong address.
About images
Images inside an article keep their Timothe-hosted addresses. They are not copied into the Shopify files library.
When it does not work
"Enter the store's myshopify.com address rather than the domain shoppers see"
The address given is the storefront domain. Use the .myshopify.com one from Settings > Domains in the Shopify admin.
"Connecting failed" after approving in Shopify
The connect attempt is only valid for a few minutes. If the Shopify screen sat open for a while, or the store approved was not the one entered, start again from CMS in Growth Calendar. Blocking cookies for this site has the same effect.
"Choose the Shopify blog to publish into"
The settings were saved without a blog. Reopen CMS and pick one.
"No blogs came back from this store"
Either the store has no blog yet, or the connection no longer works. Create a blog under Online Store > Blog posts > Manage blogs; if there is already one there, disconnect the store and connect it again.
Publishing stops working after it had been working
The app was probably removed from the store, which invalidates its access. Check Settings > Apps and sales channels in the Shopify admin, then connect the store again from CMS.
Other CMSs
WordPress, Ghost and Shopify are supported today. Other systems will connect from the same screen as they are added.