What’s new or currently rolling out

Callout Banner widget improvements

We've added new options to this widget to make it more flexible:

• It can be used in place of the page title on any page by checking a box on the widget’s form. This will hide the regular page title and make the Callout Banner headline a level one heading (important for SEO and accessibility).
• A background image is no longer required. If no image is provided, the Callout Banner will display a solid color background matching your theme’s primary color.
• “None” is now an option for Call to Action, so that you can choose not to have a link button or search box under the text.

See our updated instructions about using the Callout Banner widget.

Updated toolbar icons

In previous months we mentioned that we are standardizing the icons used throughout the administrative interface so that we can bring you sharper and more up-to-date icon designs. When you log in to the site, you’ll notice that the icons used in the administrative toolbar across the top have been updated. This includes the Control Panel, Dashboard, and User Account toolbars.

List of Sites widget

This new widget is available on Institutional Sites to help administrators showcase their various OpenScholar sites. They can build lists of sites filtered by type of site or research area, and display them in list or grid views. We plan to expand the capabilities of this widget to make it easier to find and explore all the public sites available on OpenScholar.

Locations taxonomy

This global taxonomy is now available  to be configured. Organization Administrators can define a Locations taxonomy for tagging content across all their OpenScholar sites. Locations can be major cities, regions, or campuses, depending on how you categorize facilities and programs at your institution. This will allow your organization to showcase its primary locations on the research dashboard and facilitate discovery of content across sites.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

As usual, we fixed some bugs and optimized settings to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. And our development team updated a few Drupal modules and server packages (Drupal is the content management system underlying OpenScholar). We take care of the hosting and software, so you can focus on managing your content.

What’s coming soon

Site visibility indicator

We will be adding an indicator icon to the administrative toolbar to help site owners understand the status of their site. When sites are newly provisioned and being built, we recommend making their visibility “Anyone with the link” or “Site members only” to prevent content from appearing in searches before it is ready. Site owners must make their site “Public on the web” when they are ready to go live so that search engines and outsiders can find it.

Content automation and AI

We are continuing to work on a feature to pull new publications from PubMed automatically on a daily basis and planning an integration with ORCID. Our plans to incorporate AI to assist with content generation are shaping up and we will share our AI feature roadmap soon.

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.