OJS Clean Setup and Restore Files

Describe the issue or problem

Hi all,
As a 2-years OJS user as the Journal administrator, I’m now more and more familiar with OJS interface to solve problems or configure. However, I think that during the learning process I too much dug into the configuration files and feel like spoiled some of them, such as the cache is not properly working. As I log into my account and change pages in administrator panel, I sometimes seem logged out and logged in when I refrest the page. That persists after cleaning all caches for a long time of try.

Hence, I would like to ask whether it is possible to clean setup the latest version OJS again but restore the files and page contents.

Appreciate any help.

What application are you using?
OJS 3.4.0.5

Hi @ademirkol,

Thanks for your post. I can understand the first part of your query, but regarding this:

I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to achieve - can you elaborate?

Also, given the problem you’ve described, it might be helpful if you could have a look at your PHP error logs (or have a system administrator look at them if you don’t have access), and report on errors found there.

-Roger
PKP Team

Hello Roger,

Thank you for the response and sorry for my bad explanation.

The thing I would like to be able to do is, keeping the published material on the website including informations on the page and published articles etc. while just updating the configuration files in CPanel File Manager such as php files that I was digging too much during my learning processes of the system.

I feel like I have messed some configuration on files such as locales, cache, plugins over two years of trial and error. But in the meantime the Journal has started to be active so I cannot easily delete everything and fresh start.

Hi @ademirkol,

Thank you for clarifying.

The configuration of OJS is mostly limited to one file: the config.inc.php file - so any changes that you make to that or through the administrative interface of OJS (e.g. changing the settings), doesn’t affect the content of the site.

If you have modified any of the code in any files, maybe what you could do is upgrade to the latest version: OJS 3.4.0-6, this will upgrade you to the latest code in OJS and should overwrite any files that have been modified, provided that you do it properly. You can see how to go about upgrades here: https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/dev/upgrade-guide/en/

Might that work for you?

-Roger
PKP Team

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ojs has the ability to export and re-import users and publications, so you could export them and then import them into a new installation, but lose some things, like statistics. As you were advised, however, the updates actually cancel all the changes made. The only files that need to be copied between versions are the public folder and the config.inc.php file. If you have made changes to config.inc.php you can start from the new version and, using the diff command, identify the differences and copy them into config.inc.php of the fresh installation.

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Dear @ademirkol

Set session_check_ip = On to Off for resolve below issue.

“Sometimes logged out and logged in when I Refresh the page”

Hi @rcgillis , @Nick_Straw , and @Editor_IJIER

I have followed all the suggestions you made, and now it seems I do not have any more problems with the system.

I have now updated the system to the newest version and changed the config file and the session IP setting.

Thank you for providing the best solutions!

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Dear @Nick_Straw

I’m totally understand your suggestion. But if we follow your suggestions there’s are few issues can be happen. I am giving few off them below

  1. Your published article will get new articles id and link.
  2. DOI needs to update accordingly.
  3. You will get lot’s of 404 error due to unavailable articles link.
  4. User’s will not have track on their submitted articles

In my opinion import and export is more suitable if you migrate form one solution to OJS.

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@Editor_IJIER
You are right. I mentioned the loss of statistics, but to be complete, the article IDs and therefore the relative DOIs also change. To index articles on Google, you can use a .htaccess file with Redirect 301 between old articles and new ones, but if there are many, it is a very long job. Less complicated with the DOIs that only need to be updated via the plugin.

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