There’s a handful of core apps which our Shopify developers use time and time again on just about every store we work with. One such app is Accentuate Custom Fields. One common reply to questions about custom development work is: “Absolutely, we can do that. But you’ll need to install Accentuate first…”
We tend to do custom builds and complex Shopify development projects with needs that sit well outside of the ordinary. Metafields bridge the gap between Shopify’s fixed back-end and what clients actually need: flexibility.
Hands down, there is no better Shopify metafields app on the market. You’ll need to be able to code Liquid to make the best use of Accentuate. So this app is for developers, really. If you’ve come from a WordPress background, think ACF for Shopify. It’s a similar app.
Why do we use Accentuate as opposed to other meta fields apps?
These are the main reasons why we use Accentuate as our go-to meta fields app:
- No matter what kind of data you need to house on a product, variant, post or page – accentuate has it all. You can add images, text strings, videos, colours, embedded code, numbers, as well as references to other store objects.
- Repeatable meta fields. Define a set of metafields once – let the merchant create as many “blocks” as they want. Really, really, really useful. This allows you to avoid bloating a theme with single-use templates with sections, not to mention the confusion this causes or the fact that storing permanent data in a theme is pretty dumb.
- Merchant friendly. You will only confuse merchants with meta field keys and namespace talk. Merchants don’t really have the capacity for that stuff, and it’s not good to use anyone’s time to define meta fields all the time on each product/variant etc. Merchants hate that stuff. They love simple interfaces which make sense – and accentuate gives exactly that. A flexible user interfaces for storing data.
- Multilingual support. We all jumped up and down with excitement about the new multilingual functionality from Shopify but then hit a load of brick walls with apps not supporting it. Accentuate was fast in supporting this new functionality.
- Robust & well supported. The app is rock solid, and we use it on Shopify & Shopify Plus stores selling tens of millions each year. We’ve spotted a couple of bugs over the years, but they have always been fixed quickly. As of writing, we’ve not seen any major outage of accentuate.
- It has an API.
What do we use Accentuate for?
We use accentuate to allow merchants to add additional data to their stores with ease. We can then use that data theme side or in custom apps – or anywhere we need. Examples include:
- to store pick and pack locations
- to store hero images on page templates
- to store FAQ content where multiple FAQ pages are needed
- to store advanced customer data
- to allow merchants to override certain theme elements on specific content
- as a replacement for sections where lots of content is needed, e.g. blog posts where one template is defined and a number of blocks (meta field arrays).
- to store variant-level images as a set rather than just one, which Shopify gives natively
- to store advanced SEO data attributes & schema values
Our Score
We give accentuate 10/10 – no doubt about it. If you’re looking for the best metafields app for Shopify, you’ve found it right here.
