Classic Theme, Forthcoming Plugin

Software Support
1

Hello,

We are using the Classic Theme in OJS 3.2.1.4. We need to publish articles ‘online first’ and have therefore installed the Forthcoming Plugin. The plugin seems to work fine from a functional perspective (though only after changing the menu item from ‘customs page’ to ‘remote url’). There is a problem concerning the appearance of the Forthcoming issue page, though. Specifically, the text displays all the way over at the left margin, instead of being centred or offset with a sensible margin like all the other classic theme pages.

Here is the page with test content:
https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/forthcoming

This problem does not seem to occur on other sites that use the Forthcoming plugin (e.g. https://horizonepublishing.com/journals/index.php/PST/forthcoming), which have a little bit of html before the

element that seems to set the alignment of the header and body text appropriately. We think (??) that it may therefore be a problem specific to using the Forthcoming plugin in combination with the Classic theme. In any case, we would be grateful for any insight or advice, to help it look normal.

We do not have the technical skill or confidence to try to edit the plugin or theme themselves. We considered altering the “h2” element in our stylesheet but that would cause unwanted changes on other pages. We tried adding blank space to the left of the issue name for the Forthcoming issue itself, but it seems the header text is hard-coded so it does not help.

Application Version - OJS 3.2.1.4

We’d be very grateful for any help or advice.

Thank you very much!

James Rice
The White Horse Press

1 Like
2

Hi @James_Rice,

The plugin uses its own Smarty template, designed to fit the Default theme (and its child themes).
Unfortunately, this means that other themes will need to add styling or override the template by themselves. In this case, I think the simplest would be to upload custom CSS to the journal, which adapts its styling accordingly.

3

Hi @Vitaliy, Thank you for your advice!
I am not sure we can fix it at journal stylesheet level without causing unwanted changes on other pages (i.e. we’d have to modify the style for “h2”, which is used many times elsewhere; or to insert html that adds in the missing div container, which I don’t think can be done from css, though I might be wrong). However, for the moment we will work around the problem by making a static page with appropriate styling, and manually pasting the source code from the Forthcoming plugin’s own page into the static page whenever we publish an article, and then we’ll offer navigation to the static page, only. So the static page will mirror the forthcoming page, but with correct alignment. It is a little cumbersome but it still allows us to publish online first, which is the objective; and this way we can more easily customise the page, too, if we want to.
Thank you very much for your help!
Best,
James Rice

4

Yes, it may be tricky:

5

Hi Vitaliy,
Thank you very much for these tips. They are new to me so I will eat up on them and see if I can make something work.
Thanks again - I appreciate your help!
Best,
James Rice