Membership Component for Joomla 5.x

Erik Jorgensen

Purpose

Membership was developed to coordinate onboarding of new personnel and provide a continual reference of information on members past and present for administrative staff, IT, and faculty.

  • To inform the staff responsible for onboarding when a new member has joined SCI and keep track of the tasks that need to be done and which have been completed.
  • Gather information useful for SCI admin and IT regarding members at SCI such as contact information, office location, position, and supervisor.  
  • Keep an archive of headshot photos to aid in visual recognition and for use in public relations content.
  • Provide a searchable index of contact information that may be used by all members of SCI.
  • Provide an archive of information on past membership for reference. 

As of this writing, the Membership database contains entries for 1,118 past and present members of SCI. 

Presentation

The component provides a public index of members available on the SCI Members website with just publicly available information. It is linked on the main menu under "SCI Membership." Authenticated users with access privileges may also access a front-end Management interface which allows non-technical users to add and edit membership information without needing to navigate the Joomla back-end. Once logged in, authenticated users will also see "Manage Members" and "Archived Members" in the main menu.

Members Public list view

The SCI Members page contains the common elements of a search box and pagination. By default it displays a simple list of members in alphabetical order by last name. Column headers can be clicked to reverse order or sort by room number. Clicking on a member's name brings you to their index page showing a headshot, position, contact information and office location.

WEB Map

With over 200 members covering three floors, it's a frequent challenge to locate any one member within the building. A special feature displayed on each member page is a dynamic map of the Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) showing the member's location and the path to it from the elevator. Student labs show the other students sharing the lab and the specific desk location of the student at hand by seat number. The map itself is automatically generated based on the room number and seat number entered in the database so it requires little effort to maintain.

Member page with map
WEB Map in dark mode

Clicking any location on the map instantly changes it to show which member occupies that location. Floor numbers at the top can be clicked to change the floor displayed. For users who prefer a dark-mode display in their browsers an icon is available to switch the map to match a dark-mode display. Since the map is javascript driven, printing the page would normally loose the dynamically generated elements. This map, however, is equipped with a specially designed print feature that preserves the content when printing.  

Management

Authorized users who are logged in can access the "Manage Members" and "Archived Members" tools. In order to preserve information on past members without cluttering up the list of current members, the Membership database is split into two sections. Once a member has left SCI, their file is marked as "Archived" then only appears in the Archived members side. If they come back, they can be easily marked as Active and restored. The two tools are functionally identical except the Archived list has buttons available to completely delete files from the database.

SCI Membership manager list view
Archived Members list view
In order to avoid editing conflicts, when a staff member is editing a Member's file, that file is marked as locked and cannot be opened by another user. Once the file is saved or closed it is unlocked for editing. Clicking on a Member's name or the "New" button takes users to the Member edit form.
 
Member Edit form
In addition to collecting and maintaining information on SCI Membership, the tool is designed to facilitate communication during the onboarding process. When a new member file is created a support ticket for IT is automatically generated to get them started setting up the accounts and computer resources needed. In addition, when a member is added or edited a notification email is sent to a list of interested staff members containing a link to the member file where they and see the changes. If the user does not want a notification email to be generated, an option at the top allows them to suppress this behavior. The list of email recipients is set in the component Settings.
Below the standard form, a comment feature is available where a conversation can be had among staff regarding the setup process for this member. Users may post, edit or delete their own comments or reply to the comments of others. 
In the upper-left corner of the form is a Drag-n-drop photo upload box. If a photo is added in this box, once the form is saved, one or more resized and cropped versions of the photo are generated. The list of sizes desired are also set in the component Settings.
At the very top of the form just below the member's name, a log can be expanded showing a history of changes made to the member's file, who made them and when.


Component Settings

Membership Options Panel

The first box in the Membership settings, Photo Sizes, allows for the specification of image versions to be created when a Membership file is saved with an uploaded image. The original photo will be preserved and copies will be made which are down-scaled and cropped to match the desired sizes. If a size is specified that is larger than the original photo, it will be ignored. 

The Groups section specifies the Member types that may be associated with each member. In the case of the SCI Institute this consists of various types of faculty, collaborators, students and staff.

The Account Types specifies the types of network account IT staff can create for users. 

Room Numbers & Titles allow the specification of Room numbers at the Warnock Engineering Building which may be used occupied by Members. This list is used to populate the room number selection field on the form so room number data is kept consistent and matches locations found on the WEB Map. It also allows setting labels to rooms that appear on the map. If no room label is specified, the "#" symbol can be used to indicate that "Room ####" (with the number replacing #'s) should be used as the label. Each room number should be listed on its own line with a "|" character then the room label desired. 

The "WEB Map" on/off toggle allows activation or deactivation of the map feature.

The "Notification Emails" on/off toggle allows activation or deactivation of sending out notification emails when a member file is added or modified.

"Send From Email" specifies the sending email address to use for the notification emails. If "[user email]" is indicated, the email address of the user who added or modified  the member file is used. Likewise, "Send From Name" indicates the proper name of the sender. If "[user name]" is used, the proper name of the Joomla account holder who is adding or editing the member file is used.

"Notification Recipients" specifies the list of email addresses who should recieve the notifications that are sent out when a member file is created or edited.

"New Account Notification Recipients" specifies one or more recipients who should be notified only when a new account is created. This feature is used by IT to generate a request ticket when a new member is added.