Custom uploaded css style sheet - permissions trouble

Hi,
I have uploaded a custom css sheet for each of our two journals. They seem to upload just fine and do have an impact on the look. However, I cannot edit them because I lack permissions. I created these files, edited and uploaded them, so I know I can locally “own” them but somehow in the process of uploading they have been changed to 644 and won’t let me do anything. I have admin rights on my server but not superuser to where I can modify the file permissions. Has anyone else had this happen and how did you fix it? I can get my server manager to change the permissions, but I am afraid they may somehow revert back.

Hi @sheardln,

What are you using to edit these files? If you’re using something like the CPanel file manager, that may be the problem; depending on your server’s configuration, files created by OJS may not end up belonging to the account you’re using in CPanel to administer files. The best thing to do is edit the CSS file on your local machine and upload a changed copy via OJS whenever you need to.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Thanks Alec. I am using Filezilla and TextWrangler. I can do most of the changes before I upload, but will still need to “tweak” the css after uploading to make sure it does exactly what I want. Do you think this is the problem and if so, how do I get around it?
Thanks, Lisa

Hi @sheardln,

Unfortunately this is just a characteristic of the server you’re using; it sounds to me like it’s configured such that PHP scripts (like OJS) run as a different user than your CPanel administration tools. This is commonly the case with servers running mod_php, which I suspect is your situation. If you have a sysadmin handy, then ask them to configure their server environment so that PHP scripts run under the user account, rather than the system-wide apache or www-data accounts.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

@sheardln, if you initially upload the file through the OJS interface, I would expect that you could re-upload a modified version of the file through the OJS interface to replace the original version.

I think this was @asmecher’s original suggestion; I’m curious as to if this is not working, or if you have a reason to not approach the change this way.

Thanks Alex, I will talk to him about that - it is a centrally configured server so that is probably the case. @ctgraham , I did upload the first iteration of the style sheet that way and it worked fine. As I explained to Alec, I am in the “tweaking” phase where I am just making very slight minor adjustments to the stye and then seeing how it looks refreshed. Using the current system, I would be re-uploading the style sheet every 5 minutes or so - just not time or energy effective. I assumed that a lot of people did final css editing this way but maybe I am the only one.

hi @sheardln I’ve had the same issue and have had to re-upload every time I want to make a change. However one think you can do if you are not already is use the “Web Developer” > “Inspector” tools in Firefox (it’s accessible in the upper right hand corner). Using that split screen you can write in your “tweeks” to the CSS just by modifying the “Inspector.” The page will update immediately with these little changes so you can see what different options do and how it looks. Once you’ve decided on your list of preferred changes to your CSS, the process of actually changing your sheet can happen all at once and you don’t have to go through the upload process just to ‘see’ how things look. I hope that is helpful. When I discovered the “inspector tool” everything got so much better. Monika

2 Likes