Install on ShopifySee any section running, on desktop and phone, before you install it
Every section in the catalogue now previews live inside Modulo, with a real phone view, so you can judge it without installing it first.
Opening a section in the catalogue used to show you a photograph of it. Now it shows you the section, running.
The preview is the real thing: the same Liquid, the same stylesheet and the same script that get installed into your theme, rendered live. Carousels scroll, accordions open, marquees move, popups open on their own so you can actually see them.
The phone view is a real phone view
There are two small buttons in the corner of the preview, Desktop and Phone. They are not a zoom.
Picking Phone renders the section in a genuinely 390 pixel wide window, which is the width of a common phone. That matters because a section's mobile layout is written against the width of the screen, so the only way to see it honestly is to give it a screen that width. Scaling a desktop rendering down would leave every one of those rules switched off, and you would be looking at the desktop layout made small.
It goes further than width. A section that shows arrows on a mouse and hides them on a touchscreen will hide them in the Phone view, because the preview reports itself as a touch device while it is in that mode.
What the content is
The preview uses a small demo catalogue, clearly labelled as such: Demo Product 1, Demo Brand, and neutral placeholder photography. Nothing there is pretending to be your store, and no invented numbers appear anywhere.
Your own theme's fonts and colours are not applied in the preview, because they belong to your theme rather than to the section. A line under the preview says so. Once the section is installed, your theme takes over as it always has.
If a preview cannot load
The catalogue photograph is still there underneath, and it is what you see. A preview that fails is never worse than what the catalogue showed you before.
This came directly from a merchant, who put it better than we would have:
Many of them look interesting, however as I cannot test unless I install, it does become a pain to install and test it. This preview helps a lot as you can see what functions it has and how it works, and especially you can see how it will look on the phone version.