Consultation Process recipe — formal reviews

The Consultation Process recipe (consultation_process) adds a formal organisational consultation workflow to the intranet. Use it for the things that require more than a quick comment: policy reviews, budget approvals, document consultations, compliance sign-offs, change-management decisions.

The workflow is opinionated and relies heavily on ECA for automation: the author submits a Consultation with a deadline, a type, a description and a list of reviewers; ECA automatically creates a Consultation Review node for each reviewer; each reviewer files their opinion (Pending → Completed) on their assigned review; views aggregate progress; the original author marks the consultation Accepted or Rejected.

It is a recipe, so it is opt-in — install with drush recipe recipes/consultation_process when the company is ready to formalise decision-making.

What it is

The recipe ships:

A Consultation content type (consultation) — the proposal.
A Consultation Review content type (consultation_review) — one per reviewer per consultation, automatically created by ECA.
Three ECA models that automate the review-task lifecycle (create / delete review tasks when reviewers are added / removed).
Two custom roles — content_editor_consultation and content_editor_consultation_review — for clean permission separation.
Four views that surface active / closed consultations and per-user reviews.
A Consultations main-menu link (and a couple of supporting menu links).
Sample data — 9 seed consultations to demonstrate the system.

Components

The Consultation content type

The proposal:

Field	Type	Notes
Title	Text	The consultation’s name.
Type	List (string)	What kind of decision (policy / budget / change management / document review / …).
Description	Long text	The proposal text. CKEditor with the AI assistant available.
Attachments	File field, multi-value	Supporting documents (PDF policy draft, budget spreadsheet, …).
Deadline	Date	When reviewers must respond by. Drives the “active vs closed” filter.
Reviewers	Entity reference (User), multi-value	The list of people who must respond.
Status	List (string) — Active (default), Accepted, Rejected	The lifecycle state. Updated by the original author when consultation closes.

Consultations are revisioned so the audit trail is preserved.

The Consultation Review content type

The reviewer’s opinion. Created automatically by an ECA model when a reviewer is added to a consultation:

Field	Type	Notes
Title	Auto-generated from the consultation + reviewer references.
Reference	Entity reference (Consultation)	The parent consultation.
Note	Long text	The reviewer’s opinion / vote / commentary.
Status	List (string) — Pending Review (default), Review Completed	The reviewer flips this to Completed when they file.

A reviewer cannot create their own review record — the system creates it for them, ensuring exactly one review per (consultation, reviewer) pair.

The ECA models

Three BPMN models drive the automation (visible at /admin/config/workflow/eca):

On Consultation insert / reviewer added — When a consultation is created (or when a reviewer is added to an existing consultation), iterate the reviewers list, create a Consultation Review node for each, set the reviewer as its author, set the status to Pending Review, and reference the parent consultation.
On Consultation update / reviewer removed — When a reviewer is removed from a consultation, find the corresponding Consultation Review node and delete it (so stale tasks do not pile up).
On Consultation deadline reached — A cron-based model that checks the deadline field; consultations past their deadline are auto-marked or auto-notified depending on configuration.

The full models are visible in the ECA admin and editable through the BPMN.io modeller — the recipe is essentially a worked example of what ECA can do.

Views

Consultations (views.view.consultations) — The main listing. Filterable by status / type, with the deadline displayed as a days remaining badge.
My reviews (views.view.my_reviews) — What’s on my plate? — reviews assigned to the current user, sorted by deadline. The personal task list.
Consultation reviews on a consultation (embedded view) — On each consultation page, a sub-list of who has reviewed, who is still pending, who said what.
Consultation reviewers by consultation — Internal view used by ECA to iterate the reviewer list when generating review tasks.

Custom roles

The recipe provisions two task-specific roles:

content_editor_consultation — Can create / edit / delete consultations (the consultation initiator role).
content_editor_consultation_review — Can edit reviews assigned to them (the reviewer role — assigned alongside the user’s other roles).

Roles are intentionally narrow — separation of duties between initiating a consultation and responding to one is a standard governance requirement.

Workflow

The full lifecycle, end-to-end:

Initiator opens Add Consultation — fills in title, type, description, attachments, deadline, ticks the reviewers from the user list.
Save. ECA fires: one Consultation Review node is created per reviewer, in Pending Review state, owned by the reviewer.
Each reviewer sees the new task in My reviews (and optionally gets a Messenger / email notification — easy to wire through ECA).
Each reviewer opens their review, writes their opinion in Note, flips status to Review Completed. Their task disappears from My reviews.
The initiator monitors progress on the consultation page (the embedded Consultation reviews view shows pending vs completed reviewers in real time).
Once the deadline passes (or all reviewers have responded), the initiator updates the consultation Status to Accepted or Rejected. The consultation is closed.

If the initiator adds a new reviewer mid-flight, ECA creates the new review task automatically. If they remove one, ECA deletes the corresponding review task.

Integration with other features

ECA — no-code workflows — Consultation Process is the canonical complex ECA workflow shipped in the platform. It is also a great learning tool: open the three models in the BPMN modeller to see real-world ECA patterns.
Messenger — Add a custom ECA action to the Consultation insert model to send a Messenger broadcast to each newly assigned reviewer.
Search — Both bundles are indexed by DB Index Content automatically.
Multilingual — Consultations and reviews opt into per-language content; pair with the AI assistant for fast translation.
Access Control & Groups — Sensitive consultations (e.g. a board-level decision) can be restricted per group.
AI assistant — Use the AI button to draft consultation descriptions or summarise long reviewer notes.
Engagement scoring — Reviewing consultations contributes to the user’s engagement signal.

Permissions

Granted by the recipe (in addition to the two custom roles):

Permission	Default role(s)
Create / edit / delete consultation	`content_editor_consultation` + Administrator
Create / edit / delete consultation_review	(Created by ECA — humans only edit existing reviews assigned to them)
Edit own consultation_review	`content_editor_consultation_review` (assigned per reviewer)
View published consultation / consultation_review	Authenticated user
Bypass and edit any consultation_review	Administrator

Installing the recipe

cd web
drush recipe recipes/consultation_process
drush cr

Important: the recipe depends on ECA, BPMN.io, and Page Manager — make sure those are installed (the recipe declares them in its install list).

After applying:

/node/add/consultation is the proposal form.
/consultations is the listing.
/my-reviews is the personal task list.
A Consultations main-menu link is added.

Modules behind it

node, datetime, options, text, user — Drupal core
ECA and the sub-modules eca_base, eca_content, eca_log, eca_ui, eca_user, eca_views — automation
BPMN.io — graphical model editor
Page Manager and Page Manager UI — custom landing-page composition for the Consultations page

Learn more

ECA — no-code workflows — the engine behind the automation, with the three Consultation models as worked examples
Messenger — broadcast on review-task creation
Search — find consultations by keyword, type, status
AI Assistant in CKEditor — draft proposals and summarise reviews
Drupal recipes documentation