Free checklist · For agency leads

New Shopify developer: the first two weeks

If your agency used Shopify Academy to onboard new developers, that track ends on October 29, 2026. This is a two-week plan you can run yourself: the access to set up before they start, what to cover in week 1, the real work in week 2, how to review their first pull request, and what you sign off at the end. Tick the boxes as you go, or print it.

Updated October 19, 2026. Free, no account needed.

Before day 1

Access takes longest, so set it up the week before. Give the new developer only the access their work needs: you can widen it later in a minute.

Access and setup

Dev Dashboard: add them to your organization and give them a role. App Developer covers building apps and creating dev stores, with no access to production store data, financials or user management. Collaborator Store Access can be scoped to specific client stores. Roles and permissions
A dev store of their own. Free, password protected, can't take real orders, and can be filled with generated test data. To use it with Shopify CLI they need to be the store owner or have a staff account on it, so if you create it, add them as staff. Dev stores
Client stores through collaborator access. Your organization requests it per store (Stores, Request store access) and the merchant approves the permissions, for theme work the Themes permission. Collaborator accounts don't count toward the store's staff limit. Never ask a merchant for their password: it's prohibited. Collaborations
GitHub access to your base theme and to the client repos they will touch, with pull request review required on the main branch.
Your agency's base theme, with a README that says how to run it locally (shopify theme dev --store their-store), your coding standards, and your .theme-check.yml.
Their machine: Node.js, Shopify CLI (npm install -g @shopify/cli@latest), Git, and VS Code with the Shopify Liquid extension, which includes Theme Check.

Week 1: how your themes work

The goal of week 1 is one small ticket, reviewed and merged by Friday. Everything before it is there so that ticket goes well.

Week 1

Themes, standards and a first ticket

They can find any file in your base theme, follow your standards, and get a small change through review.

Walk through the theme structure together: layout/, templates/ (JSON templates list sections), sections/, blocks/, snippets/, config/, locales/, assets/. Ask them to trace which files render the product page.
Go through your coding standards: naming, how you write CSS and JavaScript, where strings go, what a pull request description must say.
The Liquid objects they will use daily: product, variant, collection, cart, section, block, settings, request and routes.
Sections, blocks and schema: have them build one small section with settings, blocks and a preset, then edit it in the theme editor.
Theme Check: they run shopify theme check locally, and see the same command run in CI on their pull request.
One small, real ticket by Friday, reviewed with the 10-point checklist below.

Read on shopify.dev

Done when: A merged pull request that passed Theme Check and your review.

Week 2: real work

Week 2 is the work clients pay for: a storefront feature, done fast and done right, then shipped to a copy of a client theme.

Week 2

A feature, performance, AI review, a client ticket

They ship a feature the way your agency ships features, and can tell when AI-written code is wrong.

A cart or variant feature on their dev store. For example, add to cart without a reload: /cart/add.js with the sections parameter, which returns the updated cart sections in the same response.
Performance basics: images through image_url and image_tag with widths and sizes; lazy loading below the fold but never on the main image at the top; CSS and JS kept with their component in {% stylesheet %} and {% javascript %}. Shopify bundles both, and the JavaScript loads with defer.
Review an AI-written section. Hand them one with a few planted mistakes (a raw price, hardcoded text, an inline style, a filter that doesn't exist) and ask for a written review, as if it were a colleague's pull request.
Ship one ticket to a copy of a client theme: an unpublished theme connected to a branch through the Shopify GitHub integration, or a pushed copy. They share the preview with you and the client approves it before anything is published.

Read on shopify.dev

Done when: A feature on their dev store, a written AI review, and a client ticket approved on a preview.

The sign-off that replaces the badge

An Academy badge said someone finished a course. This list says they did the work in your codebase. When every line is ticked, the lead signs it and the new developer takes client tickets on their own.

Signed off when they have

Run your base theme locally against their own dev store.
Merged a reviewed pull request that passed Theme Check in CI.
Built a section with blocks that a merchant can edit in the theme editor.
Shipped a cart or variant feature on a dev store.
Reviewed an AI-written section and found its mistakes.
Shipped a ticket to a client theme copy that was previewed and approved.
Explained one of those changes back to you in a short write-up.

Training a team? Team access is available by request: €240 per developer per year, €200 from 10 developers, minimum 3, one invoice.