Magento – add custom section in admin sales order view in Magento

The main block holding the 'widgets' in the customer account section is customer_account_board, so if you want to add a block there you would have to reference that one

<customer_account_index>
    <reference name="customer_account_dashboard">
        [...]
    </reference>
</customer_account_index>

Build this would require you to edit frontend/base/default/template/customer/account/dashboard.phtml to add a getChildHtml for your section.

To not be required to edit the file you could add your block under reference name content , under this reference all blocks will be included automatically.

<customer_account_index>
    <reference name="conten">
        <block type="your/block" name="your_block" after="customer_account_dashboard" template="your/block.phtml"/>
    </reference>
</customer_account_index>

Editing the back end is the same as editing the front end - you can do anything from customising the templates through to extending the various blocks and models.

I don't have a 1.8 install active right now so this using 1.7.2.

If we trace through from the URL, via the controllers and XML layout files, you'll see that the rows of that table are rendered by the block model app/code/core/Mage/Adminhtml/Block/Sales/Items/Renderer/Default.php, using template app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/sales/order/view/items/renderer/default.phtml.

$this in the template of course refers to the block model, and we can see that to render the product's name, it's using $this->getColumnHtml($_item, 'name'). Looking at the code for that function, we can see it sometimes treats $_item as a sales order item, and looking at the code to see where that comes from, we can see in the Mage_Adminhtml_Block_Sales_Order_View_Items block that it comes from the getItemsCollection method called on a sales order model, so it's an actual sales order item model. Often in Magento, a collection will be constructed to contain only sparsely populated objects (in non-Magento terms, imagine a SELECT statement that only selects a few fields), but in this case it at least contains the product ID.

Using that Mage_Sales_Model_Order_Item object, we can see from that model's code that we can call getProduct, giving us a fully loaded product object, and from there we can call getShortDescription().

So adding this:

echo $_item->getProduct()->getShortDescription()

somewhere in

app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template/sales/order/view/items/renderer/default.phtml

will show you the short description.

Tested on 1.7.2

Loading the full product model for each line shown there might be a little slow if the orders contain dozens of lines, but in most cases I expect staff will happily wait an extra second or two for the screen to load. You could optimise it by loading a sparsely populated product collection before rendering all the items... I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader!