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I'm new to TPL (Smarty) but have been using PHP for years.

Is there a roadmap/guide for customising OJS?

As far as I understand this would involve a PHP script to retrieve/assign the information and then a TPL script to actually display the information.

Thanks Petras

user3773093
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1 Answers1

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For references, have a look at the OJS Quick Reference and the OJS Technical Reference, both available here: https://pkp.sfu.ca/wiki/index.php?title=OJS_Documentation

By "Author's View Page", I'm assuming that you mean the pages with a URLs like http://.../index.php/[journalPath]/authors/view. Modifying these to include an author biography may be difficult because of the way OJS stores author records.

Each article may have several authors, and author records are not disambiguated -- for two articles with "Joe Smith" as an author, there will be two different entries in the authors table. Currently on the author listing the disambiguation is done by matching the same first name, last name, affiliation, and country. (See pages/search/SearchHandler.inc.php in the authors function for the code that does this.) Many author records may match this set of data, each potentially with its own biography data.

The reason the data is stored this way is to permit users' identities to evolve -- they may change last names, move between institutions, etc. -- without affecting the metadata of existing publications, which should not change.

If you want to determine a single biography statement, you'll need to decide how to pick a bio statement from among potentially many that match the set of data described above. Once you've done that, displaying it will be as simple as assigning the value to the template:

$templateMgr->assign('myVariableName', $somePhpVariable);

...and then using that variable in the templates/search/authorDetails.tpl template:

{$myVariableName|strip_usnafe_html}

FYI, our future plans include using third-party identifiers such as ORCiDs to disambiguate author identities; however, thus far our ORCiD integration is pretty limited. In the current release it's possible for users and authors to enter their ORCiDs so that they're stored with user and author records.

asmecher
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