Getting started with Side Kick

Darwin Side Kick is a WordPress plugin that gathers everyday site management into one screen. It has a small set of built-in tools, and it acts as the home for Side Kick modules, which are separate plugins you can add as you need them. This page covers installing it, finding your way around and removing it cleanly.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or newer.
• PHP 8.1 or newer. PHP is the programming language WordPress runs on. Your host can tell you which version your site uses, and most hosting control panels let you change it.

To open Side Kick's screens you need an account that can manage site options. On a standard WordPress site, that means an Administrator.

Installing Side Kick

Side Kick installs like any other WordPress plugin. You can find out more about it on the Side Kick product page.

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins and choose Add New Plugin.
2. Click Upload Plugin, choose the Side Kick zip file and click Install Now.
3. Click Activate.

Activating Side Kick changes very little on its own. Almost every built-in feature is switched off until you turn it on. The one exception is the Duplicate button, which is on by default, so a Duplicate link appears on your post and page lists straight away. See Duplicating pages and posts.

Finding Side Kick in WordPress

Side Kick adds one item to the left-hand admin menu, called Darwin Side Kick. It sits just below Comments. Hover over it to see its sub-menu, which always includes Dashboard and Settings. Active modules can add their own entries here too.

Only users who can manage site options (normally Administrators) see the menu item. Anyone else who tries to open the page directly is turned away.

The Side Kick screen

Everything in Side Kick happens on a single screen with a sidebar on the left and the current section on the right. Moving between sections swaps the content in place, without reloading the whole page. Each section also has its own web address, so bookmarks and the browser's back button work as you would expect.

The sidebar has three parts:

• Core lists Side Kick's own sections. This is where you find the Dashboard, which lists your modules. See Dashboard and modules.
• Modules lists the screens added by modules you have switched on. If no active module adds a screen, this part does not appear.
• At the bottom of the sidebar you will find Settings. See Settings.

Collapsing the sidebar

To give the main panel more room, click the small arrow button on the edge of the sidebar. Click it again to open the sidebar back up. Your choice is remembered by your web browser, so it only applies on that browser and device.

Dark mode

Side Kick's screens can be shown in a dark colour scheme. This is a personal setting: switching it on only changes what you see, not what other users see. You will find it under Settings, in the General page.

Deactivating Side Kick

Deactivating switches Side Kick off but keeps it installed. Use this if you want to turn it off for a while and bring it back later.

• All your settings are kept. When you activate Side Kick again, everything is as you left it.
• The debug.log protection rule is removed. If you had Protect debug.log switched on, Side Kick takes its rule back out of the server file it wrote it to, because nothing would look after that rule while the plugin is off. If the setting is still on when you reactivate, the rule is written again.
• The other built-in features, such as disabling comments or blocking breached passwords, simply stop while Side Kick is off.

Deleting (uninstalling) Side Kick

Deleting Side Kick from the Plugins screen removes the plugin's files and clears up what it stored for the whole site:

• the site-wide settings for Side Kick's built-in features;
• the record of which version was installed;
• the debug.log protection rule, and Side Kick's record of it.

Some things are deliberately not removed:

• Per-user data. Each user's Dark mode choice and any stored password history (from Stop passwords being reused) stay in the database. Password history is only ever stored as a one-way scrambled form (a hash), never as the password itself. It is removed automatically when that user is deleted.
• Modules. Each module is its own plugin. Deleting Side Kick does not delete them. What a module leaves behind when you delete it depends on the module: Omni Logger, for example, keeps its log in the database.