Hi everyone, I’m managing a website that publishes food-related research and community articles, including some pieces about restaurant operations and hospitality trends (recently featuring a detailed case study on Texas Roadhouse). The site runs on OJS 3.4.0-3, hosted on a shared cPanel environment. Everything worked fine for a few months, but recently I’ve noticed a serious problem several article pages have stopped displaying metadata properly, and some links now return 404 errors even though the files exist in the directory.
The main issue is that when authors submit new articles, the system generates the submission successfully and the review process runs normally, but once the article is published, its public landing page sometimes fails to load. The page either appears completely blank or shows the header/footer without any article content or metadata. When I check the browser console, I see errors related to Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'title') and sometimes 500 Internal Server Error when trying to fetch the article view.
I checked my PHP error logs, and it seems that OJS is unable to read certain JSON data from the database — especially from the submission_settings table. I tried running a database check, and there were no corruption errors, but the JSON field for the affected submissions looked incomplete. I’m not sure if this is related to an encoding issue or something that went wrong during an update. I did recently upgrade from OJS 3.3.0-14 to 3.4.0-3, and I suspect some data migration might not have gone smoothly.
Another strange behavior is that the article titles and abstracts appear fine in the dashboard but don’t render correctly on the front-end templates. The DOI plugin also seems to have stopped assigning DOIs automatically after the upgrade I’ve double-checked the plugin settings and confirmed that the CrossRef credentials are valid. When I try to reassign DOIs manually, the process fails silently without any error messages in the interface, but I can see warnings in the PHP log.
I also noticed that when I clear the template cache or rebuild it from the admin panel, some article pages start working temporarily, but they break again after a few hours. Could this be a caching or permissions issue with the cache or public directories? I’ve already checked file permissions (755 for directories, 644 for files), and everything seems normal. I’m wondering if there’s a deeper configuration issue with the theme or the updated Smarty templates in OJS 3.4.
Has anyone else run into issues after upgrading OJS where published articles display incorrectly or metadata fails to load? I’d appreciate any guidance on what to check database integrity, plugin compatibility, or maybe a cache layer configuration I’m overlooking. My website relies heavily on up-to-date restaurant and hospitality research, so having articles vanish or break intermittently is becoming a serious concern. Sorry for the long post!