While the OJS in and of itself is a wonderful, flexible platform, I find the web-based site management unwieldy. I find myself constantly having to go back to text editor and FTP. The experience is in stark contrast to running my organization’s Wordpress-based website.
Is there a third-party tool that will help me navigate and mange the OJS more easily - a la the Dashboard of Wordpress?
Hi @Newtonite,
What kinds of modifications are you finding you need to make via text editor?
We’re currently working on OJS 3.0, which may not entirely address your needs, but has a much more modern user interface. There are a few PKP blog posts about what to expect with that release, if you’re curious.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
One example would be the navigation bar. The set-up under 5. The Looks is not easy to use to change the navigation bar.
Another example is the submissions page. I’d like to be able to explain the registration process in detail, rather than using the boilerplate.
@Newtonite, from our work with OJS, may I suggest two ways of customizing OJS which do not require changes made through ftp:
Changing the wording. There is a plugin called Custom Locale Plugin. You can use that to edit the text which appears on the user interface, for example the submissions page text. What’s so cool about this is that all modifications are not saved on file level (i.e. localisation xml files), so that you can define them for each journal on a multi-journal install separately. Also, the changes are not lost when you update - changes on file level are likely overwritten, unless you use git and manually look at merge conflicts. (Besides that, the submissions checklist can be edited from setup as well.)
Editing the navigation bar. If by that in your question, you mean changing the links there, I would suggest you use CSS selectors to remove all links placed there automatically by OJS. Then, you can use the functions available in setup step 5 to add all the links you would like to have.