Regnum

Regnum:

The inheritable power to govern.

The Regnum project allows users to submit a form to request ownership (or co-ownership) of an organic group on the site. At the time that the form is submitted, the user may or may not have an account on the site, and the requested group may or may not already exist. When the application form is approved, the specified user will be created if necessary, and then assigned ownership of the desired group, which will also be created if it does not already exist.

The purpose of this module is to provide a mechanism to manage officers in a large, multi-branch organization. It is presumed that every branch of the organization has a number of officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer, etc.). Each office is given an organic group to conduct business in; this group is created as needed, with the primary officer being set as the owner of the group. If the group already exists, then its owner will merely be changed when a new primary officer takes over.

Branches and offices are based on taxonomy vocabularies. There should be a vocabulary that represents all of the branch group locations; this vocabulary should have hierarchical terms, with the hierarchy representing levels of control in the organization (e.g. with city groups reporting in to regional groups, and so on). There should also be another vocabulary that lists the names of all of the offices that are used in the organization.

The entityform module is used to create the form that a user will fill out to request an officer change. The form should have fields that identify the Drupal user's username and email address; any form field that is attached to both Drupal users and to this entityform will be used to automatically update the user's information when the form is submitted and approved. When a form is approved, a Drupal user will be created for the new office holder, if one did not already exist. If the new officer already had an account on the system, then it will be re-used for this purpose. In the case of officers with existing account, either the username or the email address of the user may be entered, and the other user-information fields on the form may be left blank.

Thus, this module effectively provides a replacement for the usual Drupal user registration process. One reason for this is to allow a unified form that can be used to either create a new user, or update the user information for an existing user. This consistency is of great advantage to causal users of the site, who may simply fill out the Regnum form again, rather than learning how to edit their user information. The other advantage of the Regnum form is that the approval process for assigned officers follows the defined hierarchy of the branch groups. The President of each group may approve the officers for that branch, but approvals may also be made by the group's webmaster, or by the officer of the parent group (e.g., the regional treasurer can approve the treasurer of a local group). When an officer Regnum change form is submitted, then every user who is able to approve the change will be notified. A list of available submissions to be approved is listed on every user's personal user page (if they have approvals). It is also possible to assign transition dates in the future, that may be approved in advance; when the effective date arrives, the new officer is automatically put in place.

The intention is for this module to be used with passwordless, so that notification emails may contain a one-time login link that directs the user to their user page, where the approval can be initiated. Of course, a one-time login link may also be utilized even without using the passwordless module. Domain access is also strongly recommended, so that each branch group can also appear to have a separate site with its own look and feel, while still being centrally organized with the regional group sites.

This module is still in development. The admin configuration page contains templates for the email notification messages that are sent out, but information on the taxonomy terms and entity form to use is currently hardcoded into the function _regnum_configured_entityforms(). It will be possible to configure the form to use and the applicable taxonomy terms that control it from the admin page at some point in the future.