Here are the highlights from the past month.

What’s new or currently rolling out

New services in Follow Me widget

Bluesky and Threads are now available in the Follow Me widget. These social platforms have been rising in popularity. If you are active on those platforms, you can now add a link to your profile there. Read more about Follow Me widgets.

Updated theme screenshots

The thumbnail images for several themes have been updated, so when you are previewing themes under Control Panel > Appearance > Themes, you will see a more accurate representation of what the theme will look like. For the best example, click the “Preview” link under the theme name. This will show you how the theme will look with your current content.

After switching themes, you may need to move widgets around or adjust spacing so that all your content looks good in the new theme.  Read more about changing themes.

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 applied a security update for Drupal core and updated several Drupal 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

Accessibility tools for everyone

Editoria11y is an in-app tool for content editors. It scans the content of your page and makes recommendations for improving its accessibility. Accessibility Coordinators at your organization can view reports to identify areas that need attention. This feature has been available on OpenScholar sites by request for over a year. The pilot has been successful, and we are planning to enable the feature for everyone. Read more about Editoria11y and improving accessibility.

Widget editing improvements

We’re cleaning up the display in the modal windows that open when you are editing or creating widgets, so that they match more closely with the new administration theme. Soon after that, we’ll begin switching widgets to use the new-and-improved experience for uploading images and files.

AI-assisted content generation

We continue to work toward incorporating generative AI features like suggestions for image alt text and page titles, drafting text, and adjusting tone (see our AI roadmap). Organizations will need to opt-in to having these AI features enabled, so they may not be available on all sites.

What’s being retired

We have removed legacy themes that were not applied to any client sites from the system. 

As mentioned previously, 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.