What’s new or currently rolling out

Streamlining widget editing forms

We’ve been reorganizing the fields on each widget form and updating help text and labels to improve usability. We recently released changes for several more widgets: Faceted Taxonomy, Featured Posts, List of Files, List of Posts (Content), Mailchimp Subscription, Publication Authors, Publication Types, Publication Years, and Taxonomy. We hope these small changes and clarifications will make your site building experience even smoother.

Revamped publication pages

We’ve rearranged the order of information shown on the full view of publication pages so that the most important details are near the top. The bibliographic citation, thumbnail image, link to publisher or store, and abstracts are shown first, if available, while “See also” tags and attached files are at the bottom. We also removed links from the citation titles on these pages, since you are already viewing the full detail page.

Personalized funding recommendations

Two rounds of funding recommendations have been emailed to site owners who have opted into this service. These recommendations include grants from private foundations, government agencies, and other sources that match the specific research areas described on your OpenScholar website. Read more about the benefits of OpenScholar Funding Match and visit our funding match help page to learn how to enable it on your site and manage the email recipients.

A third round of emails will go out on February 4 - check your inbox!

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

We fixed several bugs and optimized settings to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. We added an additional layer of security monitoring on our code and updated several software packages and Drupal modules to keep things secure and running smoothly (Drupal is the content management system underlying OpenScholar). This month we also transitioned to a new deployment workflow to replace a service that was being retired. We take care of the hosting and software, so you can focus on managing your content.

What’s coming soon

Text editor upgrade

The upgrade for our rich text or WYSIWYG editor is almost complete. When editing formatted text, you’ll notice:

• a refreshed toolbar with common styling options
• a more intuitive experience for inserting media, allowing you to easily select sizes, set alignment, and add captions
• a more intuitive experience for inserting links, allowing you to select from existing content and turn links into buttons

We’ll share more details and examples on our blog after the upgraded text editor is released.

AI-assisted content generation

Soon after the release of the upgraded text editor, we plan to introduce AI-assisted content authoring. We are exploring the addition of tools to generate and summarize content, adjust tone, translate into other languages, and more.  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.

New theming system

We are continuing work on a new unified theme that will have a sleek modern design with institutional branding and more configurable options for headers, footers, and widget appearance. This will replace the standard themes that currently offer only minor visual variations and too much inconsistency in headers and footers. Please see the November 2025 Product Update for more details about the changes coming to our theming system.

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.