What’s new or currently rolling out

Personalized funding recommendations

OpenScholar Funding Match is finally here! This is a brand new service that will send monthly emails to site owners about funding opportunities that align with the research described on their website. These recommendations will include grants from private foundations, government agencies, and other sources that we are collecting, all curated to match your specific research areas and strengths. Read more about the benefits of OpenScholar Funding Match.

The OpenScholar support team has enabled the service for sites that are research-oriented, appear up-to-date, and have an identified site owner. If you would like to enable or disable funding notifications for your site, or add additional email recipients, please see our funding match help page for detailed instructions.

The first round of emails will be sent to subscribers in early December.

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 a few 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

WYSIWYG editor upgrade and AI-assisted content generation

We continue to work on upgrading the WYSIWYG editor to enhance security, improve media handling, and prepare for integration with AI content tools. See May’s Product Update for more details. 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

The theme is what controls the look and feel of your site - colors, fonts, spacing, and sometimes unique visual accents for specific widgets. The theme is different from the template, which is what determines the starter content and provides guidance when you first build your site.

We’ve begun 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. There will be simpler settings to manage global features like the logo, site name, search box, social links, and contact information. The widget-based editing system will continue to apply to the content area of pages where more flexibility is required.

Each site will look unique based on the settings you’ve chosen for your header and footer and the content and images you provide on the pages. It will be clear that it is part of a family of sites at your institution, with its own distinct flair.

The new theme will work with a variety of site templates, for personal sites, projects, labs, centers, core facilities, and departments, so it will be easier to generate a site, customize the elements shown in the header and footer, and start focusing on your content. Having a single theme will also enable our development team to add new widgets and design elements more quickly, since they won’t have to make them compatible with dozens of standard and legacy themes.

When the new theme is ready, we will help transition existing sites to use it. We anticipate this step is several months away. Stay tuned for details.

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.