1. Getting Started

Welcome to Understory — a premium Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme for independent podcasters and audio creators. Sell memberships, premium episodes and merch, all around a persistent sticky audio player and 10 distinct homepage demos.

Requirements

• An active Shopify plan.
• A Shopify Online Store 2.0 store (the current default — JSON templates & section groups).
• A modern browser for the Theme Editor.
• No coding required. No paid apps required for the core features.

2. Installation

Option A — From the Shopify Theme Store (recommended)

1. Open Understory in the Shopify Theme Store and click Try theme to add it to your store for free — you only pay when you publish it.
2. Understory appears under Online Store → Themes in your theme library.
3. Click Customize to open the Theme Editor, or Actions → Preview to preview first.
4. When you're happy, click Actions → Publish (and buy the theme) to make Understory live.

Option B — Shopify CLI (for developers)

If you work with the Shopify CLI, unzip the theme and push it as a development theme:

shopify theme dev    # local preview with live reload
shopify theme push   # upload to your store

3. Home Demos

Understory ships 10 home page demos, each delivered as its own Online Store 2.0 homepage template. To show a demo on your storefront, set its template as the homepage.

Choose a home demo

1. Open the Theme Editor (Customize).
2. Use the page switcher at the top of the editor and choose Home page, then open the template dropdown.
3. Select the demo template you want — for example index.home-membership — and the homepage switches to that layout.
4. Edit its sections to taste and click Save.

The default homepage is index.json (the Broadcast flagship). The other nine are the index.home-* templates listed below.

The 10 demos

4. Theme Settings

Global settings live in Theme Editor → Theme settings (gear icon). These apply across every page.

Color scheme — light, dark or auto

Theme settings → Colors → Color scheme chooses how the storefront is painted:

The dark scheme is generated from the same palette you edit above — your accent colour is lifted automatically so it stays legible on a dark canvas. You do not maintain two palettes; change your brand colour once and both schemes follow.

5. Header, Menus & Footer

Logo & header

The header and footer are Online Store 2.0 section groups. Open the Header section in the Theme Editor to upload your logo, choose the menu, and toggle the search, account and cart icons.

Navigation menus

1. Go to Online Store → Navigation in your Shopify admin.
2. Edit the Main menu (header) and Footer menu.
3. Add links to collections, pages, blogs (your shows) or products. Nested items become dropdowns.

Footer

The Footer section holds menu columns, a newsletter signup, social links and the copyright line — all editable as blocks.

6. Sections & Pages OS 2.0

Understory is a full Online Store 2.0 theme, so every page — home, product, collection, cart, search, blog, article, 404 and static pages — is built from sections you can add, remove, reorder and configure.

1. In the Theme Editor, use the page switcher at the top to navigate to the page you want to edit.
2. In the left panel, click a section to edit its settings, or click Add section / Add block.
3. Drag sections and blocks to reorder them. Use the eye icon to hide without deleting.
4. Click Save.

Sections overview

Understory's content sections are built for audio brands:

Editable static pages

Pages such as About and Contact use JSON page templates, so they are fully editable in the Theme Editor. To assign a template to a page, open Online Store → Pages → (your page) → Theme template and pick the matching template (e.g. page.about).

7. Products & Collections

Add products

Create products in admin → Products as usual (memberships, premium episodes, merch). Upload product images, set prices and variants, and add them to collections. The product page shows the gallery, variant pickers, quantity, accelerated checkout and details.

Collections

1. Create collections in admin → Products → Collections (e.g. Merch, Memberships, Premium Episodes).
2. Assign a collection image (used by collection cards and headers).
3. Link collections in your menus and in home-page sections such as Merch drop and Featured products.

8. Episodes & Blog

In Understory, podcast episodes are Shopify blog articles. This gives you native publishing, tags, RSS and SEO with no custom backend.

1. Create a blog in admin → Content → Blogs (e.g. a blog per show).
2. Add an article for each episode in admin → Content → Blog posts.
3. Set a featured image (used as the cover art), an excerpt, tags and an author.
4. Add the episode's audio via the episode.audio metafield (see next section).

The blog listing and article pages are JSON templates, so you can add sections (e.g. a newsletter CTA) around the post content. Episode sections on the homepage pull from your articles automatically.

9. Sticky Audio Player

Understory's signature feature is a persistent footer audio player. It stays mounted as the visitor browses, so playback never stops between pages within a visit.

How it works

Any "Listen" / play button in the theme carries a data-play-episode attribute plus the episode's metadata. Clicking it loads that episode into the sticky player and starts playback. The buttons use these data attributes:

The episode.audio metafield

On the article page, the "Listen" button is wired to a per-article metafield. Add the audio source there:

1. In admin → Settings → Custom data → Articles, add a metafield with namespace and key episode.audio (type URL).
2. Open an episode article and paste the audio file URL (e.g. an MP3 hosted on Shopify Files or your CDN) into the episode.audio field.
3. The article page's "Listen" button now plays that file in the sticky player. Featured-episode and transmissions-rail sections also accept an audio URL in their section/block settings.

10. Memberships & Premium Episodes

Memberships and premium / paid episodes are sold as standard Shopify products. Recurring memberships use Shopify selling plans (subscriptions).

• Create a product for each membership tier or premium episode.
• Show them with the Membership tiers and Membership tuner sections, or a normal product / collection section.
• For recurring billing, connect a Shopify-approved subscriptions app that provides selling plans. The theme surfaces selling plans on the product page when one is connected.

11. Languages & RTL

Understory ships seven locale files: English (default), Arabic, Turkish, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Arabic switches the entire storefront to right-to-left (RTL) automatically.

Enable / switch languages

1. Go to admin → Settings → Languages (or install Shopify Translate & Adapt).
2. Add the languages you need and publish them.
3. Customers can switch via the language selector; RTL layout applies automatically for Arabic.

Edit theme text / add a language

Storefront strings used by the theme live in Theme Editor → ⋯ → Edit default theme content, or directly in the locales/*.json files. To add another language, duplicate en.default.json to e.g. nl.json and translate the values.

12. Images License-safe

To keep the theme fast and 100% license-safe, Understory ships image-clean — no bundled stock photos. Add your own media directly in the Theme Editor.

• Upload product images on each product.
• Set collection images on each collection.
• Set article images as episode cover art.
• Add section images (heroes, lookbook, host spotlight, etc.) in the Theme Editor.

13. Performance

• Use appropriately sized images; let Shopify generate responsive variants (the theme uses width-based image_url sizing, eager + fetchpriority for the LCP image, lazy-loading below the fold).
• Host audio files on a fast CDN or Shopify Files; keep episode MP3s reasonably compressed.
• Keep third-party apps / scripts minimal — they are the most common cause of slow stores.
• Test with Shopify's Online Store speed report and Lighthouse after adding your content.

14. Privacy & Cookies

Understory ships a cookie-consent banner wired to Shopify's Customer Privacy API. It is not a decorative bar: accepting or declining actually sets the shopper's tracking consent, which is what gates marketing and analytics pixels.

Enable it

1. In the Theme Editor, open the Cookie banner section (it sits with the other page-level sections).
2. Tick Enable cookie banner.
3. Write your heading and message, and link your privacy policy.

The banner only appears where consent is legally required. Shopify decides this from the shopper's region, so if you are testing from a region that does not require consent you will not see it — that is correct behaviour, not a bug.

Set your store's own privacy rules in admin → Settings → Customer privacy.

15. Credits & Resources

Open-source resources used by the theme (each under its own license):

• Fonts — Antonio and Inter (Google Fonts, SIL Open Font License 1.1).
• Icons — custom inline SVG in the Feather style (no icon-font dependency).

Demo media shown on the live preview (not included in the theme ZIP — the download is image-clean):

• Photography — Unsplash (Unsplash License, free for commercial use).
• Host / reviewer avatars — Pravatar (free placeholder avatars).
• Product video — Coverr (Coverr License, free for commercial use).

Fonts are used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; icons are original inline SVG.

16. Support

Theme support is included with your purchase. We help with theme bugs, included-feature questions and minor guidance.

When contacting support, please include your store URL and a clear description (with screenshots) of the issue and the steps to reproduce it.