Your own AI assistant, the Tringify CLI and other connected tools, apps you install and API tokens can change your theme. They never change your live theme directly: their changes to it are saved to a copy of your live theme and wait for you. Shoppers see nothing until you publish them.
Where to find them
When a tool or app first saves changes to your live theme, you're notified in Store Admin and the mobile app, and by email. In Online Store > Themes, Theme changes to review lists every set of changes waiting: the tool or app that made them, the storefront and theme, how many changes there are and when they were last updated. Choose Review to open one.
What you see
Pages — each page the changes affect, before and after. Before is your live theme as shoppers see it now; after is the same page with the changes.
Files — each theme file the changes add, change or delete. Open a file to compare the two versions line by line. A file that also changed on your live theme since is marked: combined when both changes fit together, a conflict when they don't.
Settings — each theme setting whose value changes, with its value before and after.
To check a particular address, such as search results or a filtered collection, enter it in Storefront address, for example /search?q=shirt or /collections/summer?filter.color=red, and select Show. That page appears first, before and after.
Try the changes on your storefront
Select Try on storefront to open your real storefront with the changes, in this browser only. You can browse, add to cart, sign in and go through checkout. A bar at the top names the theme and has Exit preview. While you preview, checkout offers only payment methods connected in test mode, so any order you place is a test order; nothing you do reaches analytics, pixels or ad platforms; and shoppers keep seeing your live theme. The preview ends when you select Exit preview or when the preview link expires, after two hours. Try on storefront is also in the theme editor, in the live preview and in Online Store > Themes in the mobile app.
Publish
Publish applies all the changes to your live theme at once, and shoppers see them right away. The publish is one change in the theme's code history, recorded with the name of the tool or app, so you can undo it there in one step. See Theme code history.
Discard
Discard deletes the changes and the copy. Your live theme stays as it is, and the tool or app can make its changes again later.
When changes can't be published
You and your team can keep changing the live theme, and update it from the Theme Store, while changes wait for review. When you publish, anything that also changed on the live theme is combined with the changes where both fit together. Publish is refused, and the review says why, when:
a file or setting also changed on the live theme in a way that can't be combined with the changes. Discard them and ask the tool or app to make them again on the live theme as it is now;
the live theme has unpublished changes in the theme editor to the same page. Publish or discard them in the theme editor first;
another theme was made live after the changes were made. Discard them and ask for them again on the new live theme.
When your live theme changes, through a Theme Store update or its undo or anything you publish, the changes waiting for review are brought onto it straight away, so Review and Try on storefront show what publishing them would make live. Changes that can't be combined with the live theme are left as they are and marked as a conflict.
Limits
Each tool or app has one set of changes waiting per storefront, and its later changes are added to it. Up to 3 tools and apps can have changes waiting on a storefront at once; another one is refused until you publish or discard one of them. The copy that holds the changes doesn't appear in your theme list and doesn't count toward your theme limit.
Theme Store updates
A connected tool can update your live theme from the Theme Store, or undo that update, only after you say yes to it in the conversation: your AI assistant shows you what the update changes and asks you first. You're notified each time, and you can undo the update for 30 days in Online Store > Themes. Tools and apps can update a theme that isn't live without asking.
Translations of your theme text are not theme changes: when a tool or app translates it, the translation applies straight away and doesn't wait here. See Translate theme text.