Resend welcome message from admin user/edit

@smustgrave pinged me about this.

I agree with @alexpott that its a useful feature.

Looking at the suggested feature itself, are we using the "Welcome message" terminology for their registration email? (Is this clear its about an email in the first place, not a Drupal message showing on the website?). I believe when a user registers they get that feedback text (https://git.drupalcode.org/search?search=welcome%20message&nav_source=na...), but not sure admins know or recognize this terminology? Maybe "Resend welcome email" would be clearer?

Otherwise the feature looks great.

Thanks @Gábor Hojtsy!

Am moving to NW as there seem to be failures in the MR.

I've queued the issue for review at 📌 Drupal Usability Meeting 2023-02-24 Fixed or a future meeting. And for sure if anyone familiar with the issue would have the time to present would be more than welcome and helpful. Meeting takes place every Friday at 14:00 UTC (currently 7:00am PT, 10:00am ET). See time.is to see what that is in your timezone.

Usability review

We've discussed this issue at 📌 Drupal Usability Meeting 2023-02-24 Fixed . The recording of the meeting can be found at https://youtu.be/ylo5SvxbbmI

For the record, the attendees on friday's usability meeting were @AaronMcHale, @benjifisher, @rkoller, and @simohell.

In the following a summary of the points we came up during the meeting:

1. It might be a reasonable step to add an option to disable the send message functionality with a checkbox on for example /admin/config/people/accounts - per default the option should be enabled.
2. If you visit the user edit page of another user (for example /user/2/edit) there are several aspects to note about the three buttons at the bottom of the page: Save, Send welcome message and Cancel account:
   • Function-wise Send welcome message is fundamentally different from Save and Cancel account. We should try to follow the principle that one form shouldn't do too many things at once and the user edit form is already doing many things at once. By adding a third button at the bottom we are further adding to the "chaos".
   • Visually the primary button Save is highlighted in blue while the action link Cancel account is highlighted in red. The button in the middle is just grey and doesn't provide any other visual cue. The button has to be noticed and then has to be read - there aren't any visual cues aside that and the cognitive load is challenging.
   • Behind the scene there is also logic in place deciding which of the three welcome messages defined on /admin/config/people/accounts is sent out to the user. The user has only a single Send welcome message button and is potentially unaware, which of the messages is sent out to the user, and or even unaware that there is a differentiation taking place at all. This applies to the button on the user edit page as well as the bulk actions in point three.
   • In the context of the user edit page the following potential edge case has also to be kept in mind. In case the user wants to change the password and at the same time send out the welcome message, he or she might be unaware that the password is only changed after the form is saved. So in case the user is changing the password, then clicking the Send welcome message before hitting the save button, the one time login url would be referring to the old password and not to the newly entered one.

   All those potential stepping stones lead to the following recommendation following a pattern that was applied for example in #987978: Move "administrator role" setting to new Role Settings form → :

   • Add a new tab to the user profile page - that way a single page would be focused and dedicated to a single task.
   • By moving the send functionality from a sole button to a dedicated tab it would be possible to provide some more descriptive help text on top to the users.
   • Underneath the help text add vertical tabs, the pattern used on the /admin/config/people/accounts page in the emails section.
   • Within each tab have the none editable preview of the to be send message as well as a send button.

   Out of the scope for this issue, but the group wondered why there is only the option for sending a welcome message? If you take a look at the list of available email templates on the account settings page, then there would be at least a reasonable need for for example the ability to send a password recovery email. By the addition of such a "send message" tab it would be easily possible to extend the list of available options there. It would make sense to open up a follow-up issue for that.

3. There was a consensus in the group to provide the level of control for bulk actions as well. Problem is that it is probably not possible to group options in the bulk action select list and adding all available options ungrouped wouldn't an option either due to bad readability. Therefore recommendation is to use a config page similar to the one if the option Cancel selected user account(s) is selected:
   • On top the list of accounts the email is sent to.
   • Then a list of radio buttons where the user is able to select the type of email to be send.
   • For the selected option a preview of the message being send should be displayed
   • At the bottom a send and cancel button.

In the end one general question that applies to user profile pages as well as the block actions. What is the reasoning behind that the Send welcome message button is visible on user profiles of users that never logged into their account, on profiles where users have already logged into their account and also on the user profile of the account i am currently logged in? Indirectly that applies to bulk actions as well. There is also no distinction made between accounts that never got logged into and others that already got logged into. Is there a purpose and need that already logged in accounts could get a welcome message resend? Is it due to the fact that some administrators have reutilized the welcome message for other purposes?

The issue status is already set to needs work so I only remove the needs usability review tag.

I attended the usability meeting where we reviewed this issue. (See Comment #240.)

It is outside the scope of usability, but my personal opinion is that this issue should be closed as "won't fix". It can be implemented in a contributed module, and I think that most sites do not need this feature.

Whether it is done in Drupal core or in a separate module, I agree with the usability recommendations in #240. Most important:

1. Create a separate page (a tab on the user edit page, also known as a local task) instead of adding a submit button to the form.
2. Let the site administrator choose which e-mail to send, instead of making the decision in code.

The second point applies to both the form on the user-edit page and to the bulk operation. Create a configurable bulk operation, so that the site administrator can select user accounts from the list, then select the "bulk email" action, and then, on the confirmation form, select which e-mail to send.

As per the suggestion by benjifisher I have created a contrib project to provide the functionality that is added in this issue:
https://www.drupal.org/project/resend_register_mail →

The 2 mentioned usability improvements still need to be incorporated into this contrib project. Patches welcome there.