What’s new or currently rolling out

Full domains visible on Sites List

The Sites List Dashboard, accessible to Organization Administrators, now includes the full URL of each site underneath the site name. This will help you see which sites are hosted under custom domains and which are under the main domain for your institution. When visiting a site under a custom domain, administrators have to log in separately to that domain to access editing features.

Streamlining widget editing forms

We’ve been reorganizing the fields on each widget form into two tabs, Content and Settings, to simplify the task of editing. This reorganization reduces the amount of information to scroll through on the first tab and helps editors focus on the most important elements of each widget. We recently added tabs and other usability improvements to the Column, Image Gallery, and X/Twitter widgets.

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 over 20 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

Personalized funding recommendations

OpenScholar Funding Match is a brand new service that will email site owners about grants and other 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.

Our beta testers gave us positive feedback and excellent suggestions for making the system even better. We are making improvements in preparation for launching the service in mid-November. If you are interested in using Funding Match, please email us at support@theopenscholar.com. 

WYSIWYG editor upgrade and AI-assisted content generation

Both of these features are still in progress. 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.

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.