Metafields are a good thing in Shopify since this gives you the power that you do not have with any other CMS, to add custom data to your resource types.
Metafields are a powerful feature within the Shopify platform that allows store owners and developers to add custom data to their Shopify resources.
These resources can include products, collections, orders, customers, and more.
Essentially, metafields allows you to extend the default data model provided by Shopify to meet your specific needs.
By using metafields, you can store any type of custom data that you require for your store or app, such as additional product attributes, custom order fields, or customer preferences.
You can then use this data to enrich the shopping experience for your customers or to improve your store operations.
One of the key benefits of using metafields in Shopify is their flexibility.
You can define metafields as text, numbers, booleans, dates, or even as more complex data structures like JSON objects.
This means that you can store a wide range of data types and formats, and use them in whatever way makes the most sense for your store.
Another advantage of using metafields is that they can be easily accessed and manipulated through the Shopify API.
This means that you can integrate your custom data with other apps and services that you use, or even create your own custom reports and dashboards to help you analyze your data.
Overall, metafields are a powerful and flexible tool that gives you a great deal of control over the data that you store in Shopify.
However, it’s worth noting that one drawback of metafields is that they can become difficult to manage when you have many of them pinned.
Currently, it’s not possible to group metafields together, which can result in a cluttered and lengthy resource type page.
Despite this limitation, there are several strategies you can use to manage your metafields effectively.
One approach I use is to use descriptive names and consistent formatting for my metafields to make them easier to scan and find.
Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that Shopify is constantly improving and updating its features, and it’s possible that grouping metafields may become a built-in feature in the future.
Overall, while the lack of grouping functionality may be a limitation, the benefits of using metafields in Shopify make them a valuable tool for any store owner or developer looking to customize and enhance their store’s functionality.
For this tutorial I assume you have the metafields definitions already created since I’ll only show you how to order them to make it easier to spot and manage them on the resource page.
First login to your Shopify admin. If you do not know how to follow this tutorial: How to login into your shopify store?
Metafields on resource page
If you do not have the metafields pinned, you won’t see them listed on the resource page.
For example let’s take a look at the product page inside the Shopify admin area:
Go to the “Products” page (marked with 1 in the image above) and select any product.
You’ll see the “Metafields” section (marked with 2 in the image above) but no metafields listed though you know you’ve created metafields.
The metafields are not visible as I said since they are not pinned.
If you click the link “Show All” (marked with 3 in the image above) you’ll see all the metafields (marked with 1 in the image below) you created for this specific resource type which in this example is the “Product” page:
On this page you can add data to the metafields for storing.
To go another level deeper and actually access the page where you can pin and order the metafields you need to click on the “View definition settings” (marked with 2 in the image above) and you’ll reach this page:
But we do not want that.
We do not want to make so many steps to edit the metafields this is why pinning comes in handy.
Metafields page
A shortcut to access the metafields listing page is to go to “Settings” like in the image below:
Click on the “Settings” link and you’ll see the settings page opened in a pop-up like in the image below.
On this page click on the “Custom data” menu item (marked with 1 in the image below) from the left sidebar.
Now you can see the “Custom data” page and the “Metafields” section (marked with 2 in the image below).
In this section you can see all the resource types and how many metafield definitions they have.
I’ll access the “Products” metafields definitions (marked with 3 in the image below):
As you see now we are on the “Product metafield definitions” page (marked with 1 in the image below) and on the right of each metafield definition you can see a little pin icon (marked with 2 in the image below) which looks disabled.
When pins are enabled they are orange.
As you see in the image below there is no way to order the metafield definitions.
Clicking on the pin icon will pin the metafield definition to the view on the product page in admin and this will also allow you to sort them in the order you want to do it.
Pin the metafields
At this time to avoid clutter on the resource page I recommend pinning only for metafields that you need to change the data often.
Once you click on the disabled pin icon (marked with 2 in the image above) Shopify will split the metafields in pinned (marked with 1 in the image below) and unpinned (marked with 2 in the image below) metafields.
Active pins will become orange (marked with 3 in the image below) and the drag and drop ordering feature becomes available (marked with 4 in the image below):
Note that the pinned metafields will not be listed in alphabetical order but rather from the last that you pinned to the first pinned.
Order the metafields
Now with drag and drop (marked with 1 in the image below) you can order the metafields as you please.
After you are done, close this pop-up (marked with 1 in the image above) and go back to any of your products and you’ll now see the metafields in the order that you arrange them:
Please note that only the pinned metafields will be visible here.
Conclusion
I hope this will help you put some order in place in the resource types pages when it comes to metafields.
Hopefully in the future Shopify will offer grouping to make metafields easier to manage.