AT Issue Display: FAQ & Troubleshooting

Yes. The plugin itself is free: download the free version (no account, no licence, no AT Gateway needed). The card and wide-card list layouts, card styles, colours, cover images and the home page style work without a licence. A premium licence adds the badges, your own accent colour and the archive year selector, plus 2 years of updates and support.

Buy a licence on the product page, install the free AT Gateway and paste the key under AT Gateway › Licences & updates. Premium switches on in the plugin you already have: nothing to uninstall or reinstall, and your settings are kept.

No. Article pages, every citation tag, OAI-PMH, feeds, sitemaps and “How to cite” stay byte-for-byte the same with the plugin on or off. Only the look of the issue’s article list changes.

No. It adds a stylesheet and, for premium, a badge row through OJS’s own hooks. Switch it off and your journal looks exactly as before.

Cards and the wide-card list work with the Default theme and themes built on it, such as Manuscript. With Classic and Health Sciences the theme keeps its own article list; badges and the year selector are added. With other themes the plugin adds what fits and never breaks a page.

OJS 3.5 (PHP 8.2 or later). OJS 3.4 and earlier are not supported.

Yes. Each journal that switches the plugin on uses one seat of your licence and has its own settings.

No. The plugin sends nothing and adds no cookies or analytics. Badges read the statistics OJS already stores on your server. Only AT Gateway’s daily licence check talks to the store.

No noticeable difference in our tests. Badge counts use one grouped query per page with a 6-hour cache, and the licence check is local.

Your journal shows the free layout: nothing published is hidden and your premium settings are kept. When the licence is active again, the badges and other premium features return by themselves. After the 2-year update period ends, premium keeps working; renewing only brings updates and support.

AT Gateway is not installed or not enabled on this site. Ask your site administrator to upload AT Gateway in Administration › Site Settings › Plugins, enable it, and enter the licence key under AT Gateway › Licences & updates.

AT Gateway is installed but the licence is not active for this journal. The reason in brackets is AT Gateway’s own status:

• No licence key: the site administrator hasn’t entered the key yet.
• Not activated: the key is there but this journal has no seat yet (for example all seats are used by other journals). Click Save & activate in AT Gateway; if no seat is free, switch the plugin off in a journal that no longer needs it, or buy a pack with more journals.
• Not valid: the key is wrong, expired or revoked. Check it in My Account › Licenses on the store.
• Locked – store unreachable too long: the server could not reach store.altechmind.com for 7 days. Ask your host to allow HTTPS to store.altechmind.com, then click Check now.
• Key must be re-entered: paste the licence key again in AT Gateway.

Open Administration › Site Settings › Plugins › AT Gateway › Licences & updates for details and click Check now after fixing it.

Version 1.x kept the licence key in the journal settings in plain text. For security it has been removed; only the last 4 characters are kept so you know which key it was. Your site administrator enters the key once in AT Gateway.

• Check that the plugin is ticked in this journal (Settings › Website › Plugins), not only installed.
• Reload the page without the browser cache (Ctrl+F5 / Cmd+Shift+R).
• Your theme may use its own article list (for example Classic or Health Sciences): the card layout does not apply there, but badges and the year selector do.
• The home page uses the style only when Also use this style for the current issue on the journal home page is ticked and your journal has a current issue.

• Premium must be active (see the box at the top of the settings).
• Abstract views / Downloads must be ticked under Premium › Badges.
• Zero counts are hidden. New articles get counts after OJS processes its statistics (once a day; check that OJS’s scheduled tasks run). Counts are cached for up to 6 hours.
• The numbers match Statistics › Articles in OJS for the same articles.

The badge appears only when readers can open the article without a subscription: the journal is open access, the issue or the article is set to open access, or the issue’s open-access date has passed. Check Issues › (issue) › Access and the article’s Publication › Issue › Access settings.

That padlock comes from OJS 3.5 itself for visitors who are not logged in (a core display quirk), with or without this plugin. Those PDFs still open for everyone, and the Open Access badge follows OJS’s real access rules.

• Premium must be active and Show the year selector ticked.
• The journal needs issues in at least two different years.
• The selector is added by a small script; if JavaScript is blocked, the normal archive shows.

A year page repeats issues already listed in your archive. Marking it noindex,follow keeps duplicates out of search results, while search engines still follow its links to your issues. Your normal archive and issue pages stay indexable as before.

Use a # followed by 3 or 6 letters/digits, for example #9bcb3d or #1a4f8b, or use the colour picker. The message is: “Enter a colour like #9bcb3d (a # and 3 or 6 letters/digits), or leave the field empty.”

That’s on purpose. Text in a light accent (like lime or yellow) would be hard to read on a white card, so the plugin darkens it just enough to meet accessibility contrast (WCAG AA). The thin strip on each card uses your exact colour.

Journals that used version 1.0 keep the blue their readers already know, so an update never changes your colours. To switch, choose Altechmind lime under Colour in the settings (or pick your own accent colour under Premium).

Version 1.1 redesigns the cards, but your choices are kept: layout, columns, card style, colours, covers and badges. Your journal also keeps the blue of version 1.0 unless you choose Altechmind lime or your own accent colour. For the quietest look, choose Minimal (divider only) under Card style. Titles, links, PDFs and citation data are unchanged either way.

Choose Light under Card colours. Dark is meant for themes with a dark background; Follow the reader’s device shows dark cards only to readers whose device is in dark mode.

OJS only replaces a plugin when the uploaded version is higher than the installed one. Uploading the same version again shows no error, but OJS keeps the old files. Check the version in Settings › Website › Plugins (or Administration › Site Settings › Plugins) and upload a newer release, or update from AT Gateway.

The plugin’s stylesheet URLs carry the version number, so browsers fetch the new files. If a page still looks old, reload it without the cache. Your settings are kept on every update.