ECA: Drupal’s Automation Platform with Jürgen Haas
Details
Automate Drupal without writing code — visually on the canvas, or right inside the form you’re editing.
ECA lets you automate a Drupal site without writing code: pick an event, add a condition, choose an action. Around 16,000 sites run it today, and its visual modeler — the drag-and-drop flowchart — is the part most people picture when they hear the name.
ECA got a significant upgrade this year: a new modeler with color, dark mode, and full keyboard accessibility.
But the more consequential change is what happens when you never open the modeler. ECA now offers automation in place: click a field on a form, choose a template, and the model is built for you in the background — no canvas, no tokens, no need to know ECA is involved. Additionally, there’s a debugger that replays what your site actually did, step by step, with every variable visible along the way.
### New! Homework! Everybody likes homework, right?
If you want to get the most out of this session, take five minutes and run through these steps:
From a terminal:
```
composer require drupal/eca_starterkit
drush recipe ../recipes/eca_starterkit
```
Then, as an administrator:
- Go to your site's user list and click Add user
- Focus any text field — a light blue bolt appears beside it
- Click it, choose Change label, set a new label, and save
- Refresh the page
Your form is now altered. No custom module, no `hook_form_alter`, and nothing that required you to know ECA was involved. (Recipe path may vary with your project layout.)
Come without doing it and you'll follow along fine — but if you do it, you'll have your own questions ready. Won't that be fun?
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Jürgen Haas created ECA and maintains it, and is a Drupal core subsystem maintainer for the new admin theme. He last spoke to SFDUG in January 2022, when ECA was six months old and had about thirty installs.