We’re excited to announce that we’ve just rolled out the ability to attach metadata to a shop’s resources using the Shopify API. This means Shopify app developers can now store additional information about products, collections, orders, blogs, pages… and the shop itself. We’re calling this feature metafields.

For the time being, you can only add these metafields and edit them using the Shopify API. Some time from now, we will make it possible for a shop owner to manage them from the admin interface.

The ability to use metafields in a Shopify theme has already been implemented. So you can output and use metafields in your Liquid templates (including email templates), provided you’ve added them using the API.

Our API documentation has been updated to show you how to add, edit and delete metafields. Check out the API Documentation page on MetaFields.

A metafield consists of a namespace, a key, a value, and a description (optional). Use the namespace to group different metafields in a logical way. You can also specify that it is either an integer or a piece of text (a “string”). In this way, you’ll end up with the right type when you use it in your Liquid.

Say you’ve added to a product a metafield with the following attributes:

• description: Author of book
• namespace: book
• key: author
• value: Kurt Vonnegut
• value_type: string

You can output the value of this metafield in product.liquid with this Liquid tag:

{{ product.metafields.book.author }}

There is currently no limit imposed on how many metafields you can attach to any piece of content.

If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer, our shopify_api gem will get you started with adding metafields. Take a look at the Metafields module defined in shopify_api.rb.

Using the Metafields module, setting a metafield on a product is as easy as this:

product = ShopifyAPI::Product.find(product_id)
product.add_metafield(ShopifyAPI::Metafield.new({
   :description => 'Author of book',
   :namespace => 'book',
   :key => 'author',
   :value => 'Kurt Vonnegut',
   :value_type => 'string'
}))

Metafields can be used to further describe products, beyond the product description, type, vendor and tags. You can also use metafields to store a ‘teaser’ or ‘summary’ for a blog post.

App Store developers can also use metafields to share information between multiple applications.

The possibilities are limitless. We’re inviting you to share your ideas on how to use metafields with the rest of the Shopify’s community in our Community forums.

Update: Metafields can now be added to product variants as well.

The next developer meetup will take place on December 11th, 2009. More details to be announced at http://shopify.com/developer-meetup in the very near future.

These meetups are our way of sitting down with you the developer, hacking away on the Shopify platform and its API. We want to hear your questions, and see what sort of cool stuff you’ve got cooking.

If you came to the last meetup, thanks for all the questions and ideas! We’d like to send a particular shoutout to Marcus, CEO of Little Bird Electronics who showed off an idea for adding icons to Application Links – we loved it so much, it wasn’t long before it was integrated into Shopify. Take a look at it here.

We’re still working and thinking about your other ideas like searching through the API and creating discount codes through the API. We really want to make sure we get it right the first time it goes out, so if you have any ideas about how you’d like to see the API presented or work, now’s the time to let us know.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

The Shopify Team

Shopify is having an App Developer meetup September 25th.

Come join us in IRC in the #shopify channel on irc.freenode.net at 2:00PM EST and talk with some of the API AppStore developers about how you can turn some ideas you’ve got floating around into a moneymaker sold on the AppStore.

For more about building Apps, see http://www.shopify.com/developers/

Unsure about IRC? Jump over to the web-client, choose a nick for yourself, and join the channel.

After listening to early adopters of the Shopify API in the Developer Forums, we’ve rolled out the ability to issue count requests on resources like Order and Product.

The count requests look like and take the same conditions and parameters you’d give to the existing find request you’re used to – they just return a count of how many orders, products or other resource you’re querying for.

Here’s an example of how to ask how many orders have yet to be shipped:

  http://snowdevil.myshopify.com/admin/orders/count?fulfillment_status=unshipped

  ShopifyAPI::Order.count(:status => "unshipped")

Check out the updated docs in http://api.shopify.com and the open-source shopify_app plugin at Github.

Shopify’s latest feature allows you, in addition to receiving email notifications for new orders, also receive WebHooks. WebHooks are a way to tell Shopify to call a script on one of your own web servers and react to the event in any way you want.

• Notify your IM client or your pager when you are offline
• Collect data for data-warehousing
• Integrate your accounting software
• Filter the order items and inform various drop shippers about the order
• Create license keys for software sales

Once you register a webhook url with Shopify we will issue a HTTP Post to the url specified and pass on the Order as an XML document. Don’t worry, if your server is down we will simply try again until your server confirms to us that it has successfully received the notification.

To learn more about Web hooks please visit the WebHook wiki page