Order of the Arrow Virtual Unit Elections Portal

This is the Unit Elections Portal used by Occoneechee Lodge. This system allows for our lodge to track unit elections from start to finish.

Our main website allows for unit leaders to request a unit election via a form that sends an election request to a Chapter Adviser. The Chapter Adviser has an account on our unit elections portal and logs the request. The Chapter Adviser then responds to the request via email and gives the Unit Leader an access key provided by the system and a link to the unit leader page within this unit elections portal.

The Unit Leader can then access the portal and put in all the vital information about the election candidates.

Once the time comes for the unit election, the election team can turn on voting within the unit election portal and give a completely anonymous voting link to the Scouts within the unit. Once a scout vote, the system leaves a cookie on their device preventing them from voting more then once.

After voting is completed, the unit election team turns off voting and the election results are available immediately. The unit leader, election team, and lodge leadership all have access to view the results. Only lodge leadership with the Admin privilage have the ability to export the results.

Features

• User Management
• Automated Election Results
• Anonymous Voting
• Unit Leader Dashboard with pre-election access
• LodgeMaster Exporting

Technologies used:

Prerequisites

• PHP required

  • Minimum version: 7.0
  • pdo_mysql extension required
  • Recommended to enable shell_exec

• MySQL required

  • Version 5.6+ recommended

• Composer required

  • Version 1.2.1+ recommended
  • mbstring and dom php extensions required

  If Composer is not installed on the system or accessible through shell_exec, a self-contained composer.phar file located in the install directory is used

• cURL recommended

  • Version 7+ recommended

Components loaded via Composer

• jQuery
  • Version 3.1
  • Pulled in via composer
• Bootstrap
  • Version ^3
• PHP-Mailer
  • Version 5.2
• JSON Web Tokens (JWT) (Firebase implementation)
  • Version 5.0

Other libraries

• PHP Login for User Management
  • Version 3.1
• Originally Forked from eibrown12
• DataTables
  • Version 1.10.16
• Cropper
• LoadingOverlay
• Multiselect
  • Version 2.5.0

General Recommendations

• Enable SSL on your site! Get a free cert at LetsEncrypt

  • Their free tool Certbot makes this process virtually painless

• Linux server running Apache or Nginx is preferred

• Shell access is recommended. While it is likely possible to install this library without shell access (such as on a shared web hosting provider), this is unsupported. It's highly recommended that you instead opt for a VPS provider such as DigitalOcean that allows you root shell access

• Run mysql_secure_installation on server prior to app installation

• Host your database on an encrypted filesystem

• File/directory permissions should be locked down to an appropriate level

  • Useful information

Installation

Clone the Repository

$ git clone https://github.com/Lodge104/unit-elections.git

Install necessary dependencies with Composer

$ composer install --no-dev

Run Composer using SSH in the root directory that has the file composer.json. To use this repository, your website hosting service mush allow SSH. If you do not already have Composer installed with your hosting service, you can run the composer.phar file in the /install/ directory using the following command while your still in the root directory. Change /path/to/ to whatever your root is.

$ php /path/to/install/composer.phar install --no-dev

Run through web-based installer

Open this link in your web browser (replacing [yoursite.com] with your site address)

http://{yoursite.com}/install/index.php

Select an installation option from the pop-up modal that appears: Automated or Manual

Automated Installation Instructions

Manual Installation Instructions

Install Unit Elections Database

Find the unitelections.sql file in the root of this repository and import it into your MySQL database. This will create a new database called elections. This will keep your data seperate from user management data.

Then find the unitelections-info-sample.php file and rename it to unitelections-info.php leaving it in the site's root. Change the values within the file to match the elections database you just created.

Documentation

Site Config Settings

API Methods

* Full API documentation can be found by nagivating to: {yoursite.com}/docs/api/index.html

Change Log