Hello everyone
I’m using OJS 3.4.0-9 [defaultManuscript theme] for conference publishing (https://conferences.umc.edu.dz/nctpa2025/index)
and I just wanted to quickly update the submission wizard as needed by conference committee.
I took a look to wizard.tpl in “pkp/lib/templates/submission” and unfortunately the code was not well commented and seem a lit bit complicated for someone who dont use Vue and smarty.
So I juste need help to do some changes such as deleting all the “for the editors” step from the wizard and moving the category select section to the first step “Details step”.
Thanks for the Help.
Hi @azzedine
I won’t be able to offer direct advice on how to go about the changes (you may have to wait for someone else that you’ve noted, but I did want to offer a bit of advice and caution:
Unfortunately, there is not a real user-friendly customization of the submission wizard’s steps or field order; significant changes like removing steps or moving fields still require direct code modification. The changes you described are developer tasks and typically involve editing Vue/Smarty templates and/or using OJS hooks (and thus a familiarity with these frameworks)
I will note that it is very important to exercise caution when modifying OJS core code or templates. Such changes can lead to compatibility issues during future upgrades, as updates may overwrite customizations or introduce conflicts that break your site’s workflow.
If you do go about making changes, always document your changes thoroughly, test upgrades in a staging environment, and be prepared for additional maintenance work to re-apply or adapt customizations after each OJS update.
-Roger
PKP Team
Well
thank you for the reaction, I think I will try something like copying the submission templates from lib/pkp/templates/submission to the defaultManuscript theme to try to override.I know removing a step is more difficult but moving a form element from a step to another is likely to be simple, like this div element for example :
{if $isCategoriesEnabled} <div class="submissionWizard__reviewPanel__item"> <h4 class="submissionWizard__reviewPanel__item__header"> {translate key="submission.submit.placement.categories"} </h4> <ul v-if="currentCategoryTitles.length" class="submissionWizard__reviewPanel__item__value" > <li v-for="currentCategoryTitle in currentCategoryTitles" :key="currentCategoryTitle" > {{ currentCategoryTitle }} </li> </ul> <div v-else class="submissionWizard__reviewPanel__item__value" > {translate key="common.noneSelected"} </div> </div> {/if}
Here I’m using the category concept to manage better poster / oral communications , event if it’s not what categories are created for.
this selection between poster category or oral category I wanted it to be in the first step of the wizard after choosing a section (conference topic).
I had the chance to delay the ojs upgrade from 3.3.0.17 to 3.4.0.9, In the 3.3.0.17 version, updating the wizard was by far easier.
So, now I will create a child theme, copy the templates files to override them, and we will see what happens, I will post the result here.