Ascension Shopify theme

New locales, accessibility improvements, animated grid transitions, and fixes for variant images and collection tabs.

Added

• Korean (ko), European Portuguese (pt-PT), and Polish (pl) locales.

Changed

• Filtering, sorting, and "Load more" pagination now animate the product grid between states using the View Transitions API in supported browsers (progressive enhancement — other browsers keep the instant swap). Respects the theme animations setting and prefers-reduced-motion.
• Non-English color option names listed in the "Additional swatch variant options" theme setting now render colored active-facet pills, matching the other swatch locations. The setting also now respects the mobile "show color swatches in filters" toggle, matching the built-in language list's behavior.

Accessibility

• Keyboard focus is now trapped inside open side panels (cart drawer, product drawer, facet drawer, product info side panels, quick-view, mobile mega menu sidebar). Tab and Shift+Tab wrap within the panel, closing the panel restores focus to the trigger, and stacked panels follow the topmost overlay.
• The theme now honors OS-level prefers-reduced-motion at page load. Visitors with reduced motion enabled see no theme animations; merchants who have already disabled animations in theme settings are unaffected.

Other fixes and improvements

• Fixed variant image set matching for non-ASCII variant values. Variants whose option value contains characters outside [a-z0-9] (Turkish ı/ş/ç/ğ, Polish ł, German ß, Icelandic þ/ð, etc.) previously failed to switch the gallery to the correct image group, leaving only the first image visible. Both ends of the comparison now flow through Shopify's locale-aware handleize filter so any language Shopify supports is matched correctly.
• Fixed the Collection tabs section's "Shop {collection}" button not switching when a different tab is selected — the first collection's button was shown regardless of the active tab.
• Centralized the "is this a color option?" check into a single snippet so behavior stays consistent across product cards, variant pickers, filters, and active-facet pills.
• Modernized the SCSS build (migrated from node-sass to Dart Sass); compiled CSS output refreshed across all section stylesheets.

Combined listings support, lightbox enhancements, mobile menu navigation option, bug fixes, and slim variant options on product cards.

Added

• Combined listings support: child products linked via a shared option (e.g., Color) now swap seamlessly using the Section Rendering API instead of a full page reload. Hovering over combined listing options prefetches the child product HTML for instant switching.
• PhotoSwipe lightbox now shows a scrollable thumbnail strip and product title/variant name in a bottom bar, with section settings to toggle each feature. Navigating the lightbox syncs the product page slideshow, and variant changes update the lightbox variant title.
• New "Parent links open their own URL" header setting for mobile menu. When enabled, tapping the link text navigates to the URL while only the arrow opens the sub-menu. Applies to all nesting levels.

Changed

• Use slim variant options on product cards

Other fixes and improvements

• Important: Fixed pickup availability showing stale location data when switching between product variants. Availability now updates only after fresh section HTML is rendered, and server-side Liquid content is replaced with a template fallback to prevent outdated data from flashing.
• Fixed variant dropdowns not working
• Minor JS cleanup
• Config fix

Major performance release with 2048 variant support, Shopify account menu integration, and widespread JS optimizations across core sections.

New Features

• 2048 variants support — product pages and variant selectors now handle catalogs with up to 2048 variants
• Shopify account menu — integrated native Shopify customer account menu
• Countdown banner animation — animated countdown timer in the banner section

Performance Improvements

• Converted cart to a custom element; eliminated double-trigger on item remove events
• Optimized Collection Tabs JS — reduced unnecessary reflows and re-renders
• Optimized Header JS — deferred non-critical initialization
• Improved app.js initialization performance
• Improved Back to Top JS performance
• Improved Slideshow JS performance
• Improved Image with Text Overlay JS performance
• Improved Sticky Scroller performance
• Decreased forced reflow across layout calculations
• Improved max-height sections CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed "Use the first product image as the collection image" setting not working correctly in the Collection List section — the setting was computed but never applied to the rendered image
• Fixed Featured Collection List section images not displaying correctly
• Fixed pagination loading issue

Improvements

• Improved HTML semantics across multiple sections
• Removed unused code

Fixes collection card image issue introduced on last update

Fixes and other improvements

• Fixes minor issue with collection card

Added brand new Opus electronics demo.

Fixes and other improvements

• Fixes image parsing on collection cards