Sidebar on OJS Website Home Not Showing

Hi,
I’m using OJS 3.3.0.10 and I’d like to show sidebar on the website (not particular journal) home page. I am using default theme and I can see there is an option in the website setup for choosing what to show in a sidebar, but the sidebar won’t show up on the frontend (I see the sidebar on the journal pages). Is it a result of some misconfiguration?

Thanks.

Hi @piotreba

For us, usually the reason why a sidebar won’t load is because there’s a Block plugin added to the sidebar that is generating a fatal error and causing the sidebar to break. Please look in your server’s error log and see if there are any PHP fatal errors.

Best
Jason

@jnugent
There’s one fatal error, but not sure if this is related to the issue: After I was testing the sidebar I also enabled Custom Locale plugin for the whole website. Now the home page for the website shows error 500, and there’s the following error in a log:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getId() on null in /plugins/generic/customLocale/CustomLocalePlugin.inc.php:32
Stack trace: …

Individual journal pages works fine. But nothing related to the OJS home page, including administration page, works.

How can I disable the plugin enabled in the settings of the OJS website (not individual journal), so that I can check if the error is actually related to the sidebar issue?

Yes, that seems to be the culprit. The website has no id, getId returns a valid value for a journal id.

Hi everyone,

If the administration menu in the back end is also broken because of the Custom Locale plugin and you cannot access it directly, you’ll probably need to disable it directly in the database by looking in the plugin_settings table and finding the entries for the custom locale plugin. There will be a column with a setting_name of enabled with a value of 1, where the context_id is 0. Change the setting_value to 0 which will disable the plugin.

Best
Jason

I disabled Custom Locale plugin and the website home page is now available again.
I could investigate the sidebar issue again: it appeared that this was caused by another plugin:
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function getId() on null in /plugins/generic/webFeed/WebFeedBlockPlugin.inc.php:85
Stack trace: …

I disabled the Web Feed Plugin in a sidebar and the sidebar now shows up on the frontend.

Thank you all for your suggestions!

Maybe enabling the plugins should be better managed in case they cannot work on the website home?