How to temporarily display a banner with a notification message on OJS

Context : OJS 3.1.2-4 (some instances) and OJS 3.3.0.13 (some other instances)

Hi,

I apologize in advance if the answer to this question is trivial…

Is there a simple and, ideally, native way to broadcast, on our OJS instances, for a few days in advance, a planned outage notice? We have several instances of OJS, with journals using different themes, and some of these journals do not use the announcement feature (which is also a bit less visible than I would like). I ideally want something that displays as a top banner on all pages of the journals’ public websites, perhaps on the dashboard side as well. Ideally also something that doesn’t require editing the templates of each journal. In short, a solution that is easy to set up and easy to remove once the service is taken over. :slight_smile: Thanks for your ideas and advices.

Marie-Hélène

Hi @Marie-Helene

Your request would be a nice feature to have on multi-journal OJS installation. But, given that your hosted journals don’t even use the same theme, I can’t think on a native and simple way to broadcast a outage notice.

The simplest way, that comes to my mind would be edit all used themes to use a common included file (if the idea is to edit the message just once). But, it would require some dev skills to adjust the templates.

Best,
Israel

We usually edit templates/frontend/pages/indexSite.tpl and templates/frontend/pages/indexJournal.tpl for a planned outage notice.

Another way is to use the good old Apache Server Side Includes (SSI), that we use for maintenance notices in our publication repository. The above mentioned templates would have to be edited once with a SSI that includes an external file, e.g. maintenance.ssi . We then just copy either an empty file (no notice) or a file with the HTML fragment of the maintenance notice to maintenance.ssi . This wouldn’t even need a restart of the Apache Web server and clearing the template cache as in the first method.

Thank you very much @israel.cefrin and @mpbraendle for your suggestions and advices.

Yes, indeed, a built-in notification banner feature would be welcome (for both multi-journals and single journal installations.)

I’m afraid I’m a bit late to adopt the SSI method knowing that the power down is scheduled in 5 days. Users don’t visit the site that often and in effect would end up loading a version without the include part probably if I were to change the template only from now on (if I understand correctly how it is suppose to work) but I’m keeping the idea in mind for future use.

I ended up adding, relatively quickly, to each of the journal stylesheet (already existing or created for this need), an SVG background-image of my notification text within the main header container (and thus not altering the layout of the other elements). I did have to adapt slightly to the different themes, though. Of course I will have to remove them (comment them) afterwards.