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We're excited to announce Align v2.0, our biggest release to date. This is a major release providing deeper merchandising flexibility, richer media experiences, stronger product discovery, and a more dependable path from browsing to cart. We think you're going to love it!

Under the hood, this release includes a significant work on accessibility, performance, and overall storefront hardening. We substantially reduced our JavaScript footprint, improved page loading behavior, tightened HTML and accessibility output, strengthened keyboard and focus behavior, and cleaned up core runtime patterns so Align feels faster, cleaner, and more resilient than ever.

(Oh, and we also launched our brand new company website, including updated documentation for all sections, blocks, theme settings, and core theme settings! Check it all out at companyxyz.io 👀)

This is Align's ninth major release, and our twenty-sixth overall since Align was launched 🎉 See the changelog for everything included in the previous v1.8 and v1.9 releases — they were huge too!

We'd once again like to thank our customers for your trust and patience in our work. As always, we’re here to help and we welcome your feedback. Please reach out with any questions, comments, or concerns — your input helps build a better theme and we're here to help you succeed.

Highlights include:

• Hardened cart and mini-cart behavior for quantity changes, deletes, discounts, checkout button state, refreshes, rapid chained actions, inline errors, accessibility states, and Safari layouts.
• Complementary products as both a standalone product section and an embeddable block for Product information and Featured product layouts.
• Flexible blocks in the Announcement bar and Main navigation sections, including buttons, rich text, social icons, icon-with-text content, and localization selectors (one of the most requested features!)
• Native View Transitions support for smooth page navigation in supported browsers.
• Rebuilt video and media behavior from the ground up across all hosted video, YouTube, and Vimeo contexts, including improved lazyloading, posters, overlays, aspect ratios, product media, and core UX.
• Expanded high- and max-variant product support across product pages, featured products, cards, swatches, selected media, badges, sticky add-to-cart, cart, and mini-cart contexts.

That's not all! Continue reading to learn more about what we've added, changed, fixed, and improved.

Added

• Important: Added a Complementary products section powered by Shopify's complementary product recommendations.
• Important: Added a Complementary products block for Product information and Featured product sections, with layout controls for grid and slider presentations and a new horizontal list card style.
• Important: Added new main navigation block options for richer header layouts, including buttons, rich text, social media icons, localization selectors, and icon-with-text content.
• Important: Added block-based announcement bar layouts with support for richer content, localization selectors, and more flexible alignment.
• Added native View Transitions support as a progressive enhancement for smoother page-to-page navigation.
• Added testimonial media and video review options, including hosted video, YouTube, Vimeo, poster images, image fallback, media positioning, autoplay, loop, mute, controls, and shared aspect-ratio handling.
• Expanded core theme templates with better defaults for featured products, complementary product examples, article landing pages, filtered blogs, collection hero layouts, section archives, gift cards, and more.
• Added footer video block support and expanded video usage across more section/block surfaces.
• Added broader tablet layout controls to all sections.

Changed

• Important: Improved storefront performance and PageSpeed outcomes by reducing and consolidating JavaScript, refining lazy-loading behavior, and more.
• Important: Improved accessibility and HTML quality throughout the entire theme.
• Important: Improved high- and max-variant products handling across product pages, featured products, product cards, variant selectors, image swatches, selected media, badges, sticky add-to-cart, cart, and mini-cart.
• Important: Improved video and media playback across the theme, including poster behavior, overlay options, click-to-play and click-to-pause interactions, mobile aspect ratios, custom poster sizing, YouTube and Vimeo lazy loading, and better hosted video controls.
• Improved product cards across all sections and layouts, including improved hover media, lazy loading, single-slide states, fade transitions, badge behavior, banner-style cards, 3D media, swatches, variant media, and high-variant product support.
• Improved Product information and Featured product behavior across gallery loading, mobile gallery UI, lightbox support, pickup availability, sale price styling, sticky add-to-cart, shop button polish, and parity between shared product surfaces.
• Improved cart and mini-cart interactions with more reliable quantity changes, delete handling, discount updates, section refreshes, rapid chained actions, empty-state handling, inline error feedback, accessibility states, and Safari support.
• Improved predictive search and search results with more durable input behavior, overlay layering, close behavior, shared popover UX, mobile search layout, hero search alignment, result card formatting, sort/filter behavior, and more.
• Improved collection and filtering experiences with stronger facet behavior, sticky filter durability, collapse persistence, grid loading, grid preference handling, Safari filter-panel fixes, and archive/listing polish.
• Improved tablet layout control across grid and slider sections, including better column-count behavior for in-between screen sizes.
• Improved slideshows behavior, including improved preloaders, pagination, progress indicators, loop/autoplay behavior, text controls, mobile layouts, hover overflow, editor previews, and more.
• Improved layout and style consistency across all UI/UX, including for buttons, icons, headings, captions, breadcrumbs, share/print controls, section spacing, width settings, full-bleed behavior, padding contracts, two-column layouts, mobile polish, and more.
• Improved core content sections including banners, collage, multicolumn, rich text, WYSIWYG content, testimonials, logo lists, accordions, features bar, contact forms, blog content, article cards, article comments, and more.
• Improved presets, demo content, menus, and example templates so merchants have stronger starting points and clearer examples when building new v2.0 storefronts.
• Improved theme-editor guidance and documentation, including better setting information and reference links, and improved documentation processes that will keep theme guidance current.
• Improved theme localization across all 35 supported languages, including better information links and more context-aware translations.

Other fixes and improvements

• Important: Fixed cart and mini-cart issues that could affect quantity changes, delete actions, discount totals, refresh state, checkout button state, order note styling, and Safari layouts.
• Fixed product-card issues involving aspect ratios, slideshow settings, tablet behavior, banner-style colors, hover media, 3D first-media cards, price colors, fade interactions, and variant-driven media updates.
• Fixed sticky add-to-cart and high-variant product issues affecting availability, selected media, image swatches, and product badges.
• Fixed collection filter and collection-list issues including sticky behavior and various Safari edgecases.
• Fixed search and predictive-search issues involving result layouts, submit behavior, mobile presentation, sort UX, overlay layering, and hero search alignment.
• Fixed navigation, announcement-bar, and footer issues involving text colors, widths, overflow, mobile backgrounds, hamburger colors, and various layout edgecases.
• Fixed banner, collage, multicolumn, image-block, and slideshow layout issues involving aspect ratios, overlays, borders, foreground media, stretch behavior, full-bleed layouts, empty headers, and linked media.
• Fixed rich text, WYSIWYG, testimonials, logo list, features bar, customer template, and page-content issues involving spacing, headings, list styling, alignment, rounded corners, editor previews and more.
• Fixed duplicate-ID and HTML-validation issues across reusable theme components and runtime-generated surfaces.
• Fixed Safari and mobile-specific layout issues across buttons, collection lists, filters, multicolumn sections, mini-cart, and more.

We put our heart into this release and we hope you feel the love. Thank you for supporting our independent business. Enjoy!

Version 2.0 - 19 August 2026

This maintenance release fixes additional priority issues due to the recent Chrome browser version 142 update — this is the second (and hopefully final!) maintenance release due to this Chrome update. We’ve also implemented several other fixes and improvements throughout the theme.

This release should be considered a priority update for all users. If you do not want to update your theme, please reach out to our support team for guidance on implementing specific Chrome fixes directly.

We’re still hard at work on our big new v2.0 release — we can't wait to show you what we’ve been cooking. Thanks for your continued patience!

Fixed

• Navigation layout in mobile causing mobile navigation to appear too thin
• Theme editor inspector mode issue where the inspector UI jumped to the bottom of page
• Default aspect ratio rendering for images and videos in sections, blocks, and cards
• 3D model viewer rendering in product cards
• “Sticky” scrolling elements adding too much space below sticky elements
• Legacy customer account template layouts
• Miscellaneous icon rendering, e.g. in quantity selector fields
• Missing card text color theme setting in Align preset
• Product card slideshow gallery style no works with/without variants interface.

Improved

• Cart and mini-cart quantity, discount, and delete interface and dynamic pricing
• Better logic for Features bar background gradients
• Background alt color rendering in miscellaneous elements
• Product card banner image style with variants color usage
• Accessibility features and layout improvements for Localization selectors block
• Better search window layout when used in Hero section
• Optimized JSON sanitization in templates and preset listings
• Miscellaneous minor styles and layout improvements

Thank you for supporting our small independent business! Enjoy!

Version 1.9.3 - 14 November 2025

This maintenance release fixes priority issues due to the recent Chrome browser version 142 update. We’ve also implemented several small fixes reported by customers (thank you, all!)

This release should be considered a priority update for all users. If you do not want to update your theme, please reach out to our support team for guidance on implementing the Chrome 142 hotfix directly.

Stay tuned for some awesome new features in the forthcoming v2.0 release — we can't wait to show you what we’ve been cooking. Thanks for your continued patience!

Fixed

• CSS positioning issue affecting users of Chrome version 142 which caused various frontend elements to appear out of their intended position.
• Announcement bar section text color setting now reflects the setting value.
• Banner block foreground image sizing edgecase for multiple Banner blocks with foreground images being used in the same section.

Improved

• Cart JavaScript events are now exposed to the window.
• Refined schema processing to improve code optimization.

This maintenance release fixes priority issues caught internally and reported by our customers (thank you, all!) Please reference the changelog to learn about everything included in the previous major v1.9 release.

This release should be considered a priority update for all current v1.9 users. For those waiting for v2.0: We've been working (very) hard to wrap up some awesome new features and can't wait to get it in your hands! Thanks for your patience!

Improved

• Refined CSS processing to improve minification on Shopify CDNs.

Fixed

• Theme setting issues causing some transparent color settings to default to black.

Removed

• We’ve removed the Embrace theme preset and listings to get ready for some exciting new features. Stay tuned!

This major release prepares Align for some exciting new Shopify updates and continues to refine the experience of using the Align theme.

We’ve done a top-to-bottom rebuild of all style presets and we’ve added a dozens of thoughtful, refined templates to use with each new theme style. We hand-crafted each template to help you hit the ground running with intuitive layouts designed to maximize conversion. These updates will help you effortlessly create the polished look from any of our demo stores, and will give you a huge head start to continue building your dream storefront.

This is Align's eighth major release, and our twenty-second overall since Align went live 🎉 Please reference the changelog to learn about everything included in the previous v1.7 and v1.8 releases — they were huge!

We'd once again like to thank our customers for your trust and patience in our work. As always, we’re here to help and we welcome your feedback — please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions, comments, or concerns. Your feedback helps us build a better theme.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates just around the corner!

Added

• We’ve added dozens of hand-crafted templates to match your favorite theme style and look great out of the box.
• Updated and refined the new “Align” preset (previously “Clean”).
• Updated and refined the new “Darkroom” preset (previously “Dark”).
• Updated and refined the new “Embrace” preset (previously “Calm”).
• Updated and refined the new “Playroom” preset (previously “Playful”).
• Updated and refined the new “Verdant” preset (previously “Bloom,” and “Natural” before that).
• Added new Sitewide navigation settings group for more nuanced control of the sections and layout of your store’s main navigation.

Improved

• Miscellaneous polish and incremental updates to various core templates.
• Updated