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Fluid’s themes system gives you everything you need to build, customize, and maintain a fully branded website — from a drag-and-drop visual editor for marketers to a complete Liquid templating engine for developers. Whether you’re launching a new storefront or redesigning an existing one, themes are the foundation that controls how every page looks and behaves.

Choosing a Theme

Every Fluid company theme starts as a clone of one of three platform-provided root themes. Each root theme has a distinct design philosophy and a set of ideal use cases:

Base

A clean, minimal starting point with no strong stylistic opinions. Best suited for professional services and B2B companies that need a polished, understated look and plan to apply heavy custom styling.

Vox

A modern, bold design with strong typography and high-contrast layouts. Best suited for creative agencies and portfolios that want to make a visual statement out of the box.

Fluid

A versatile, feature-rich theme built for commerce. Best suited for e-commerce stores that need extensive customization, built-in section variety, and a proven storefront structure.

How Themes Work

When you create a company theme, Fluid clones the root theme of your choice into your account. From that point on, your company theme is independent — you can modify templates, add sections, and customize settings without affecting the root theme or any other company. Root themes are maintained by the Fluid platform and receive ongoing updates. Your company theme does not automatically inherit those updates after cloning, which means you have full control over your theme’s evolution without unexpected changes to your live storefront. Each theme is made up of template files (Liquid), section schemas (JSON), assets (images, CSS, JS), and locale files (for translations). You can edit all of these through the visual Page Editor, through Code Mode in the editor, or locally using the Fluid CLI.

Theme Hierarchy

When Fluid resolves which template to render for a given page, it follows a priority order. The first match wins:
1

URL Parameter Override

If the request includes a ?template_id=... query parameter, Fluid uses that specific template. Useful for previewing unpublished templates.
2

Content-Specific Assignment

If a product, collection, or other content item has been explicitly assigned a template in the admin, Fluid uses that assignment.
3

Company Theme Default

Fluid uses the published default template of the matching type from your company theme.
4

Root Theme Fallback

If no company template exists for the requested type, Fluid falls back to the root theme’s template for that type.

Next Steps

Page Editor

Customize pages visually with the drag-and-drop editor — no code required.

Developer Guide

Build custom templates and sections using Liquid and JSON schemas.

Fluid CLI

Pull, push, and develop themes locally with the Fluid CLI.

Theme Variables

Reference every Liquid variable available across page types.

Root Theme Configuration

Connect settings, stored values, and CSS variables across Base, Vox, and Fluid.

Supported Paths

Build storefront links with the current route patterns.

Affiliate Hydration

Render affiliate-specific details safely in cacheable pages.

GitHub Integration

Connect a theme to a repository branch.