When creating your own pages: Prevent system pages from being overwritten

[bibliothekswelt]

In OJS 3.3 (and possibly in OJS 3.4 onwards) you can create your own pages via Website → Setup → Navigation → Add item → Custom page. It’s possible to enter any name in the field “Path” and accidentally overwrite existing system pages, because there’s not a specific subfolder for own pages, but something like “example.com/index.php/journal/%PATH%”). For example, you can create a page named “search” and overwrite the search page - or create a page “oai” and overwrite the access to the OAI interface. This should not be possible.

Here’s an example

The standard OAI interface for an OJS journal looks like this (my institution has set up a search engine, that indexes academic content world wide via OAI)

Create an own page named ‘oai’

The new ‘OAI’ interface page

To prevent this, a subfolder should always be created if you create an own page (like “example.com/index.php/journal/pages/%PATH%”)

[asmecher]

Hi @bibliothekswelt,

The opportunity for namespace collisions is intentional; some have used the feature to “overwrite” built-in pages in OJS. It is an opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot, but potentially useful.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team