[OJS-2] article details pages suddenly show up empty

Software Support
1

Hi,

We’re facing a serious problem with our OJS-2.4.8 installation. Suddenly, the detail pages of articles in the OJS pipeline show up empty, apart from the submission ID and authors (sensitive information anonymized):

This is all information that is shown, regardless of the tab selected (Sumary, Review, …).

Yet, the summary pages do list more information per article: submission ID, submission date, authors, title, and details of the editing process:

This seems to suggest that the information still can be retrieved, but is not shown in the detail page. This is happening for all articles in the system, even from past issues. Also, authors still seem to be able to submit articles, and OJS does send notification emails to the editors.

As far as I know, nothing has changed on the OJS or server setup. Only, last week an attempt had been made to upgrade the server’s PHP installation to 5.6.30 and fastcgi. Since that appeared incompatible with OJS-2.4.8, the PHP version has been downgraded to 5.3 again and mod_php. We don’t manage the server ourselves and I don’t have access to log files or the database. But I’m looking for pointers that could help us fix the issue as soon as possible. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Can anyone point me to useful things to check that I can pass on to our sysadmin?

Many thanks in advance,

Ron

2

Seeing the error logs would help a lot.

If you check the html source on that page, does the html output end right after “title”? I presume that the output ends there.

If so, then the problem is probably here: ojs/peerReview.tpl at ojs-stable-2_4_8 · pkp/ojs · GitHub

For some reason when getLocalizedTitle is called OJS encounters an error, maybe. What is weird about this is that the same function is called also a couple of lines before with no problem. So maybe, the problem is strip_unsafe_html filter.

Again, not seeing the error log is a problem, but you could check that you have defined allowed_html correctly in your config.inc.php: ojs/config.TEMPLATE.inc.php at ojs-stable-2_4_8 · pkp/ojs · GitHub. But I do not whether a misconfiguration there would cause this.

3

Thank you very much for these pointers! I can confirm that the HTML source is incomplete and aborted here:

<tr>
   <td class="label">Title</td>
   <td>

I’ll pass your suggestions to our sysadmin.