CarpeMessaging
Request early access

Help · Content

Publishing a form

Publishing

Publish puts your working copy on your storefront. It is the only thing that changes what visitors see.

You can publish from either screen. There is a Publish button at the top of the editor, beside your form's name, and another on the form's own page. They do the same thing: whichever you press, the same check runs and the same version goes live.

In the editor it waits for your work to save first. The editor saves itself a second after you stop typing, so Publish is grayed for that second and says so — it comes back the moment your change is safely stored. It is also grayed when there is nothing new to publish, when a save was refused, and when something about the form still has to change; hover it or tab to it and it tells you which. Everything that has to change is listed under the preview at the same time.

After it goes, the editor says what visitors have — the moment it was published, and which version — in your store's own time zone.

Your working copy is allowed to be unfinished. A panel nothing leads to yet, a field whose label you have just emptied so you can type a placeholder instead, a question with no button to send it — all of that is saved and kept, because it is what the middle of a piece of work looks like. Nobody sees it: what your visitors get is the version you published, and it does not move until you publish again. Publishing is where the form has to be finished, and everything still to do is listed under the preview long before you press it.

Pause stops the form appearing straight away. Nothing is lost — Resume puts it back exactly as it was.

Publishing a paused form does not start it again. If you paused a form and then publish an edit, you are saying "when this runs again, this is what it shows". Resume it when you are ready.

Archive takes a form out of your way. Everything it collected stays on the people it collected it from.

Enabling forms in your theme

Publishing a form is not the last step. Your theme has to be told to run Carpe Messaging forms at all, and that is a switch in Shopify's theme editor, not in this app. There is no way for an app to flip it for you — Shopify keeps that decision with you, which is the right place for it.

You only do this once per theme.

Popups, corner cards, bars and full-screen panels

They all ride one switch, called an app embed.

  1. On Content → Forms, press Enable in the theme editor. Shopify's theme editor opens on the App embeds pane, with Carpe Messaging forms already enabled.
  2. Click Save in the theme editor.

That is it. Nothing is saved until you click Save, so leaving without saving changes nothing.

App embeds work on every kind of Shopify theme, old or new.

Embedded

A form set to Embedded works differently: it does not float over your storefront, it sits inside a page where you put it. So instead of a switch, you add a block.

"Embedded form" is ours; "app embed" is Shopify's. An embedded form is a block you place inside a page. The app embed is the single theme switch that makes popups, corner cards, bars and full-screen panels appear at all. They are different things in different parts of the theme editor, and one does not enable the other.

The block picks the form. You add the block where you want the form, and then, in that block's own settings, you choose which of your forms it shows. A block with nothing chosen shows nothing on your store — so a form appears where you put it and nowhere else.

An embedded form is as wide as the block it sits in, unless you give it a width of its own — with Width on the Format pane on Auto it fills the block, or type a number and it is never wider than that. The block has its own Limit the width and Alignment settings in the theme editor, and they still apply around it: the block's width is how much room the form is given, and the alignment decides which edge a narrower form keeps to.

In the form's editor, open Format and choose Embedded. One control stands under the Where it appears card: Place in your theme. Press it and it offers the places your theme actually has.

The pages you can choose are Home, Product, Collection, Page, Blog and Article.

Whichever you choose, Shopify's theme editor opens with the block already added and nothing saved.

You may not see all four. The menu is built from your own theme, so a place your theme does not have is not offered — that is deliberate, and it is the alternative to sending you to a theme editor that refuses. Two things decide it:

If the menu shows only two places and says to approve a permission, your store has not yet approved the permission that lets us read your theme. Open the app from your Shopify admin and approve the updated permissions, and the other places appear. Nothing is broken in the meantime — the footer and the end of a page work exactly as they always have.

And a place can be missing because we could not read your theme just now. The read happens when the screen loads and it can fail — a slow moment at Shopify's end is enough — and rather than guess we offer only the two places that need no reading at all. Reload the page and look again.

If there is no control at all, the screen says why — and there are three reasons. Read the line where the button would be:

Then pick the form. With the block selected in the theme editor, open its settings and choose your form from the Form menu. The menu lists your store's published embedded forms by the name you gave them, so name a form for where it goes — Footer signup, Blog capture — and it is easy to find. Click Save to finish. Closing the tab without saving changes nothing.

Only published forms are in the menu. You can only choose something that can actually be shown, so a form you have never published is not there. Publish it, then reload the theme editor.

How wide it is depends on where you put it. In your footer or below your header, the form takes the full width of that section group; at the top or end of a page, it takes the full width of the block it sits in. If you want it narrower wherever it lands, enable Limit the width in the block's settings, set the Maximum width, and choose with Alignment whether it keeps to the left, the center or the right of the block. Where the block itself sits among the section's other blocks is the theme editor's job: drag it.

The form remembers where you sent it. The Where it appears card carries one line per place, showing the last time you sent the form there — Sent to your footer · Sep 11 — above what your storefront has actually reported. That note is your own history, not proof the form is showing: you still have to pick the form in the block and press Save, and if you closed the tab instead, the note stays and the card below it still says no block is showing this form. Both are true at once, and that pairing is usually the answer to "why is nothing on my store".

Archiving a form keeps its notes, and archiving does not take the block out of your theme — you remove the block in the theme editor when you want to. Nothing you can press in here removes the notes.

If you had an embedded form before this changed, pick it again. The block used to be pointed at a form by a word you typed in two places. It has a menu now, and a menu starts empty — so a block you set up earlier is showing nothing until you open it in the theme editor, choose the form, and save. Nothing about the form itself has changed, and you only do this once per block.

One trip adds one block. That is Shopify's rule, not ours — so if you want an embedded form on two pages, use Place in your theme twice, once for each, and pick the form in each.

The same form can go in more than one block. Pick it in your footer and at the end of your articles and it appears in both.

You cannot drag the block into a section that is already there. The theme editor only lets you move the whole new Apps section up or down. If you want the form inside an existing section, add the block in your theme by hand rather than from here.

Blocks only work on newer Shopify themes (the ones with drag-and-drop sections). If your theme does not offer them, use one of the other shapes instead.

How wide it is, is your theme's answer. An embedded form is as wide as the block it sits in. Put it in a footer column and it fills that column; put it in a full-width section and it fills the page. It never reaches past the block you gave it, so a layout you built stays the layout you built.

In the theme editor you see a dashed box. Before you have picked a form it says Pick a form; once you have, it names the form you chose with Your live form shows here underneath. It is there so you can see at a glance that the block landed where you meant it to; your real form replaces it a moment later, and nobody shopping your store ever sees it. Add the block, move it, or drag it somewhere else and the form follows — you do not have to reload the preview.

Where it appears. The Format pane tells you what your storefront has actually shown: Shown on your store, or the step that is still missing. There is nothing to choose here — you choose in the theme editor — so this is a fact rather than a setting. The places you sent the form to are listed above it, and they are a different kind of thing: what you did, not what your store reports.

It reads more than the sightings, because a block can only show a form the theme editor is offering it. Before you publish, the card says so and asks you to publish first: an unpublished form is not in the list yet, so there is nothing to pick. A paused form keeps its place in the list and shows nobody, so the card says that too rather than calling the block empty. And if your storefront has not rendered the block in a week — you changed themes, most likely — that is a third answer, not the same as never having set it up.

Underneath it, if your theme cannot see a form yet, this card says why. The most likely reason is that the app asked your store for a new permission and nobody has approved it yet: open the app from your Shopify admin and approve it. You do not have to publish the form again — we put it back in your theme's list by ourselves the next time you open the app.

How we know whether it is on

We do not read your theme, and we never ask Shopify for permission to. Instead, your storefront tells us: every time one of your pages renders a Carpe Messaging form block, that block says hello.

On Content → Forms, the card is about the app embed, because that is what its button enables:

Adding a block does not enable the embed, so if you have only placed a block, this card stays until you enable the embed as well — which is right, because until you do, popups, corner cards, bars and full-screen panels have nothing to appear through. The card says so in those words when it can see that your store is showing blocks: your forms are appearing, and the four floating shapes are the ones waiting on the switch.

On a form's own page the same card asks a narrower question: is the block this form needs actually running? A form set to Embedded is judged on that block, not on your store in general — and it is pointed at the block, not at the app embed, because the block is what is missing. A form that is running says so in one quiet line with the time we last heard from it.

Three things follow from this that are worth knowing.

A quiet store is not a broken one. If nobody visits your storefront for a week, we stop hearing from it, and the card comes back. Visit your own store and it goes away again.

A block your theme has never shown us before appears as soon as somebody loads the page it is on. After that we only write it down about once a minute per store, so the time beside "Running on your store" catches up within a minute rather than the instant a page loads.

We are told nothing about the person who loaded the page. What your storefront sends is which kind of block rendered and which form it is set to show — the same for every visitor on that page, and nothing else.

If you publish before it is on

We will say so, and we will let you publish anyway. A note appears beside Publish: Your store has not shown this yet, with the link to fix it. A form set to Embedded whose block your theme has never reported gets the same note about the block. Either way it is a warning and never a refusal — you may well be enabling the theme next, or publishing today for a launch on Friday.

The note is about what you are about to publish, not about what is live now. If you take a form that is running happily and point it at a block your theme does not have, that note appears — which is the moment you want to hear it, rather than after the form has quietly stopped appearing.