Question posted in 
E-commerce intermediate, Shopify and Ruby on Rails newbie.
How does one go about customizing Shopify files? I have a purchased a theme but want to make some changes to the .liquid files.
Do I have to I unzip, edit, re-zip and upload in the Shopify admin section? is this supported? What are best practices for customizing themes?
3
Answers
You can get started with the instructions here, which can be done straight from the admin interface.
Once you’ve gained some experience there (try some of the shopify/liquid tutorials), you can take a more comprehensive/custom approach. And btw, you don’t need to know Rails, just the Ruby language. In fact, you can even hack away at the liquid codebase if you want.
Good luck!
In addition to @davidchappy s answer:
Would also recommend checking out ThemeKit and Slate so that you don’t have to develop from the admin.
Would highly suggest that you sign up for a Shopify Partner account. That would allow you to create development stores. Meaning that you wouldn’t have to pay an active monthly subscription before you are ready to actually receive money.
Would also give you a great dev store to work on directly with ThemeKit so you can test everything before using ThemeKit to deploy to your production (live) webshop.
All you need to do is set up a private app that allows you to read/write to theme files.