What’s new or currently rolling out

Streamlining widget editing forms

As mentioned last month, we’re reorganizing the fields on each widget form into two tabs, Content and Settings, to simplify the task of editing. This reorganization reduces the amount of information to scroll through on the first tab and helps editors focus on the most important elements of each widget. This month we added tabs and other usability improvements on the Follow Me widget.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

As usual, we fixed several bugs and optimized settings to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. We updated several Drupal modules to keep things secure and running smoothly (Drupal is the content management system underlying OpenScholar). And we continue to optimize our servers to maintain security and block bots and AI crawlers that can cause sites to slow down. We take care of the hosting and software, so you can focus on managing your content.

What’s coming soon

Funding recommendations

We’re about to beta test a brand new feature that will email site owners about grants and other funding opportunities that seem like a strong match for their projects, based on the content of their website. The more information and updates you publish about your research on OpenScholar, the better the grant recommendations will be. We’ll share more about this feature as we get close to launching it. If you are interested in participating in a trial to offer feedback, please email us at support@theopenscholar.com.

WYSIWYG editor upgrade and AI-assisted content generation

Both of these features are still in progress. See May’s Product Update for more details. We’re designing our AI infrastructure with privacy in mind. Your data will remain secure and will not be shared or used to train third-party models.

What’s being retired

Nothing specific this month. Reminder that legacy themes are not actively developed and support for them is limited. Users are encouraged to transition to one of the fully supported standard themes. To learn more about the difference between standard and legacy themes, please see our page on Theme Life Cycles.

Thanks for reading

Questions or comments? Please reach out to our product team at support@theopenscholar.com.