Protocols

What ships, and what gets built

CerimoniereWeb is distributed with two official protocols, built on the Italian D.P.C.M. of 14 April 2006 as amended in 2008:

• National protocol, covering national office holders from the President of the Republic down to brigadier generals
• Territorial protocol, covering regional and local office holders down to colonels

Those two are the proof of depth rather than a limit. The engine does not assume Italian law: it orders by category, subcategory, office, appointment, rank and seniority, which is the vocabulary every order of precedence is written in. A diplomatic list ranked by class and date of credentials, a civic order with the Lord-Lieutenant and the High Sheriff, a federal and state ordering: each is modelled as a protocol, and we build it with you during onboarding.

The ordering rules

Inside a protocol you set out how people are ranked:

• By category: head of state, first category, second category and so on
• By subcategory: A1, A2, A3
• By office or appointment within a category or subcategory
• By rank groups, where military hierarchy applies, from general officers down
• By appointment groups ordered by rank, when several people hold the same appointment and are placed according to the rank they carry

When two people are still level after all of that, the base rules take over: age first, then alphabetical order. No seat is left undecided.

Civilian dignitaries are ordered by the institutional office they hold. Military ones by appointment, rank and length of service.

One protocol per ceremony

When you create a ceremony, CerimoniereWeb asks which protocol to apply. Changing the protocol changes the order of the guests, and you can still move people by hand afterwards.

Create as many protocols as you need, with no limit. The quickest way to build a new one is to copy an existing protocol and edit the copy.