What's new or currently rolling out

Revamped Dashboards

When visiting your account page, you’ll notice some new content on the dashboard. The updated dashboard will give you quick access to content you’ve been working with recently and all of the sites that you manage.

• My Latest Edits - listing your five most recent content edits, with dropdown links to view or edit that content.
• My Sites - listing all the sites that you are a member of, with dropdown links to view the site, browse its admin content listing, manage members, or manage settings.

Organization Administrators will see an “Add a new site” button next to “My Sites,” and they can get to the full list of sites (not only ones they are a member of) by visiting Dashboard > All Sites tab.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

We fixed several bugs and optimized settings to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. We’ve also been implementing measures to prevent bad-behaving bots and aggressive AI crawlers from overwhelming our servers.

This month there was a highly critical release for Drupal core, which our team rapidly applied and deployed. We also updated several software packages and 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

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 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

As announced last month, we are planning to retire the Blog and News RSS importers in the near future. Read the earlier announcement.

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.