Publishing & Versioning

FilterIQ uses a draft-and-publish workflow. Changes you make in the app are saved as drafts and do not affect your live storefront until you explicitly publish them.

The Publish Workflow

Your filter configuration moves through three stages:

1. Draft

Every change you make -- creating a filter, reordering options, updating swatches, changing appearance settings -- is saved as a draft. Drafts are stored in the app but are not visible to shoppers.

You can make as many changes as you want in draft mode. Nothing goes live until you publish.

2. Review

Before publishing, you can review all pending changes. The Publish button on the Filters page shows a badge indicating how many unpublished changes exist.

Click Publish to see a summary of what will change:

New filters being added
Existing filters that were modified
Filters that were removed
Appearance and layout changes

3. Publish

Click Confirm Publish to push your draft configuration live. When you publish:

The entire filter configuration is written to your shop's metafield
The storefront can use the published configuration after the relevant delivery and loading steps complete; verify the result
The previous live configuration is saved as a version for rollback
A new version number is assigned

What Happens When You Publish

Publishing writes your filter configuration to a Shopify shop metafield. The storefront Theme App Extension reads this metafield to render your filters. This means:

Verify delivery -- Check publish status and reload representative storefront pages to confirm the intended configuration; delivery timing varies
No deploy required -- You do not need to redeploy your theme or modify any theme files
Check consistency -- Confirm the published version and its filter behaviour across the pages you support, including a page already open during publication

Config Versioning

Every time you publish, FilterIQ creates a new version of your configuration. Versions are numbered sequentially (v1, v2, v3, etc.) and include:

The complete filter configuration at the time of publish
A timestamp
Which changes were made since the previous version

You can view your version history from the SEO & Advanced tab on the Filters page.

Rollback

If a published configuration causes issues, you can revert to a previous version:

Go to the SEO & Advanced tab on the Filters page
Open the Version History section
Browse previous versions and review what changed in each
Click Restore next to the version you want to revert to
Confirm the rollback

The restored version becomes your new draft. You will need to publish it to push the rollback live. This gives you a chance to review the restored configuration before it affects your storefront.

SEO Policy Panel

The SEO & Advanced tab also includes the SEO policy panel, where you control how filtered URLs are handled for search engines:

URL Slug Patterns

Configure how filter selections appear in your storefront URLs:

Option	Example URL	Description
Query parameters	`/collections/all?color=red&size=m`	Filter values as URL query params (default)
Path-based slugs	`/collections/all/color-red/size-m`	Filter values as URL path segments
No URL update	`/collections/all`	URL does not change when filters are applied

SEO Indexing

Control whether search engines can crawl and index filtered URLs:

Allow indexing -- Filtered pages are indexable (can increase page count but may cause thin content issues)
Block indexing (default) -- Filtered pages include a noindex meta tag to prevent search engine indexing
Canonical to unfiltered -- Filtered pages point their canonical URL to the unfiltered collection page

The default setting (block indexing) is recommended for most stores to avoid duplicate content issues.

Best Practices

Review before publishing -- Always check the change summary before confirming a publish
Plan the change window -- Choose a time when you can inspect the storefront and carry out rollback if needed
Test after publishing -- Visit your storefront and verify filters work correctly after each publish
Use rollback if needed -- Do not hesitate to revert if something looks wrong. The rollback workflow is designed for quick recovery.
Keep version history clean -- Avoid publishing many small incremental changes. Batch your changes and publish once when everything is ready.

Need Help?

If you accidentally published a broken configuration and need urgent help, contact support@filteriq.app.