What’s new or currently rolling out

Increased character limits in Callout Banner

The number of characters allowed in headlines and text for Callout Banner widgets has been slightly increased to allow site owners space to say more in these widgets. The Callout Banner is intended for concise, engaging messages. Longer mission statements and detailed site descriptions should be placed in a text widget or on the about page.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

Our development team has been heavily focused on updating Drupal modules and server packages, including PHP versions and a security update for Drupal core (Drupal is the content management system underlying OpenScholar). Keeping all of our software up-to-date allows us to apply security updates as soon as they are released and have a solid foundation for adding new features. Protecting your data and providing a stable platform are our top priorities.

We also fixed some bugs and optimized settings, as we do every month, to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly.

What’s coming soon

We are working on several changes that will improve usability for site administrators.

Better drag-and-drop for placing widgets

We are updating the design that you see in layout mode when moving widgets around on the page. When you pick up a widget, it will be smaller and well-defined, so it will be easier to move the widget and drop it in your intended target region. This will improve the experience of manipulating layouts.

New administration theme

We are working on a major upgrade to the administration theme, which will give all of the settings and editing screens a new look and feel. Larger fonts and more generous spacing will improve readability. Buttons for key actions like “Save” will be pinned to the top of the content, so you won’t have to scroll as much to find them. The toolbars across the very top will remain mostly the same, so the changes won’t be disorienting.

New media browser for Attach Files fields

We are enabling the new media browser on the Attach Files fields that appear on most content types and publications. This will improve the experience of adding images, documents, videos, or audio files at the bottom of content. You will be able to upload new items or select one from the library using a cleaner interface for browsing. Setting the focal point on these images will also be supported, just as it is for regular image fields on Persons and News.

What’s being retired

The Dataverse widgets are used by a small number of customers. We will be hiding them in the widget list on installs that do not have an active integration with the Dataverse Project. 

We are also considering retirement of the Disqus commenting feature for blog posts. The Disqus code library is not well maintained and very few OpenScholar sites utilize this feature. We will evaluate the possible impact of removing this feature and notify any affected clients if we move forward with retiring it.

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.