University governance is surprisingly complex — faculty senate motions move through layers of committees, require approvals from multiple stakeholders, and demand a paper trail that can span decades. Manually managing this process can be error-prone and time-consuming.
This session explores how the ECA (Entity-Condition-Action) module supports a university senate site, leveraging the power of ECA to make a Drupal site a fully automated governance platform. Using Drupal's visual BPMN.io workflow modeler, and the newer react-based Modeler, we built automations that generate motion tracking numbers, route approval notifications to the right people at every stage, maintain an immutable audit log, and enforce status transitions — all without writing workflow logic in PHP (well, mostly - we'll talk a little about writing custom ECA actions).
Whether you're new to ECA or looking for real-world patterns to apply in your own projects, you'll leave with practical knowledge of how to design, build, and debug event-driven automations in Drupal.
Key Takeaways:
What ECA is and how it differs from Drupal Rules
How to model a multi-stage approval workflow visually
Real patterns from a production governance site
When to extend ECA with a custom action plugin
Tips for creating, debugging and maintaining ECA models
The future of ECA
