What's new or currently rolling out

Streamlined Slider widget editing form

We’ve been reorganizing the fields on each widget form and updating help text and labels to improve usability. We recently released changes for the Slider widget. On the main Content tab, you can select which widgets to display as slides and customize their titles. On the secondary Settings tab, you can change the slider height, duration, transition speed, scrollbar display, and navigation arrow display, or add a custom CSS class.

Size limits on uploaded media

To prevent long page loads and keep storage costs low, we’ve instituted some size limits on media file uploads:

• Images: 20 MB
• Documents: 50 MB
• Audio: 128 MB
• Presentations: 128 MB
• Executable: 128 MB

There is no limit on Videos, because those are hosted on third-party providers like YouTube and embedded in your OpenScholar site.

If you run into any issues with these file size limits, please reach out to support@theopenscholar.com for advice on reducing file size, using alternative formats, or using a third-party service designed for larger file storage.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

We fixed several bugs and optimized settings to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. We updated Drupal core and several modules to keep things secure and running smoothly (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

Research Hubs + OS Match pilot

OS Match delivers high-confidence funding opportunities with AI-powered matching. OS Research Hubs are AI-generated, researcher-validated, evergreen faculty profiles that can be paired with OS Match and more to unlock funding and collaboration opportunities for researchers. Learn more about our 90-day pilot of OS Research Hubs with OS Match.

New site creation workflow

We are adding a new form that will streamline the process of starting a new site for Organization Administrators and other users with permission to create new sites. This will replace the modal windows you currently see when clicking “Add a new site” and provide us greater flexibility to enhance the site creation flow in the future.

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

Importing RSS feeds

We have retired the Blog and News RSS importers. You can continue to import blog posts and news articles from CSV files.  Read the product update from April 2026 where we first announced this planned retirement.

Legacy themes

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.