What's new in Sidekick: build your own columns

There is a big Sidekick update rolling out, and the first piece of news is where you can run it. Beyond that, most of the work has gone into the cPanel pages you spend the most time on, the product and order lists, with fewer trips to the Maropost API and a handful of smaller fixes along the way. Here is the rundown.

With thanks to the community

Before we get into it, some credit is due. A lot of the ideas behind this update were inspired by free Tampermonkey userscripts that Maropost merchants have quietly shared over the years. What we have built is not a copy of those scripts, but it owes them a real debt, and it is only right to credit the people who built them first.

Erik Merkley wrote most of the scripts we drew inspiration from: the product and order table tweaks like order count, thumbnails, GP margin, barcode, pick zone, the RMA icon and the advert preview, along with the shared BootstrapNetoMods helper that ties many of them together. Thank you, Erik, for doing the groundwork so many of us built on.

Scott Marett at Otus Technologies wrote Add Product Links to Order Lines, which inspired our own product links on order lines. Scott is an active e-commerce consultant working across Neto and Shopify, so if you need something more bespoke than what Sidekick does out of the box, he is well worth a call.

If you would like to dig into the original scripts, the Maropost community keeps a running list of third party and custom scripts.

Now on Firefox

Sidekick is no longer Chrome only. There is now a Firefox build, so if that is your browser you can install it and get the same command palette, drawer and list enhancements you would on Chrome. Everything below works the same on both.

Build your own columns

This is the big one. Both the product list and the order list now have a Columns panel in the filters bar.

Open it and you can search for a field and switch it on as a column, right there in the native table. On the product list that is around 120 fields to choose from; on the order list you get both the order-level and the line-level fields. Sidekick remembers your layout for each store.

A few things worth calling out:

• Computed columns. You can write your own column with a formula and see a live preview as you type. The built-in GP margin column is just one of these, and you can add your own the same way.
• Every native column too. On the product list, Sidekick reads Maropost's own column customiser as well, so every column you could normally toggle shows up in the same search box as the Sidekick ones. One place to manage the lot.
• Reorder by dragging a column header where you want it.
• Rename a column by double-clicking its header. Type a shorter name, press Enter, and it sticks for that store. There is a reset button if you want the original back.
• An "active only" filter in the panel hides the inactive rows so you can find what you are after faster.

On the order list, columns understand that an order has two levels. Order-level fields sit on the order row, line-level fields sit against each line, and it all stays lined up even as Maropost repaints the table.

A better order list

A cluster of order-list features come together under that same Columns panel:

• A product thumbnail on each order line, linked to the product page.
• SKU links, so any product on an order is one click away.
• An RMA flag on orders that have a related return, linking straight to the RMA edit page.
• A smarter margin. It is now split into a revenue formula and a margin formula, with defaults that reconcile against real orders (discounts and GST included). Any line sold with no cost price gets flagged, instead of quietly showing a misleading margin near 100%.

Behind all of that, these now share a single batched round of API calls per list page, and an endpoint is only called if a feature that needs it is switched on. That puts an end to the duplicate calls that could occasionally trip Maropost's rate limit.

Advert banners at a glance

The Advertising Manager list gets an Image column showing each advert's banner as a thumbnail, with a click to zoom in. No API needed, and it quietly steps aside when a banner does not exist.

The little things

• The drawer now closes when you click outside it or press Escape, so it stays out of your way.
• Sidekick no longer shows up when you print a page.

As always, your settings and API keys stay on your own machine.

Is there a field you wish you could see on one of these lists, or something that is not behaving? Leave a comment below and let me know. Happy to take a look.