The Lifecycle widget shows the completed, current, and upcoming stages of your consultation. You can customize each stage to display the title and description of your choice, to tell your community what has happened with the project and where it will go in the future.
The title and description of the three default stages are:
Open: This consultation is open for contributions.
Under Review: Contributions to this consultation are closed for evaluation and review. The project team will report back on key outcomes.
Final report: The final outcomes of the consultation are documented here. This may include a summary of all contributions collected as well as recommendations for future action.
You can add, edit, or delete stages as required and mark stages as current to move through the lifecycle. You can only mark one stage as Current at a time. As you move through the stages, the previous one is automatically marked as Finished, while those yet to come are still Upcoming.
A filled circle marks the Current stage, while Finished ones are ticked and Upcoming ones are empty. The color of the Current stage will match your brand color, but the tick for Finished is determined by the project style you selected and cannot be changed.
Add the Lifecycle Widget
You can only add one Lifecycle per project, but you can add as many stages as needed.
Select Add Widgets on your project page and choose Lifecycle from the Select Widgets menu.
By default, the widget title is Lifecycle, but you can select the pen icon to edit it or check Hide title to hide it. The widget has three preloaded stages and is set to have Open as the Current stage.
Select Add stage from the drop-down menu to write a Title and Description for your new stage. Save & Close when you’re finished.
Or, select Copy Existing Stage to copy from an existing project. Choose the project from the Select project drop-down, check each stage you want to copy, and select Add to Widget.
You can edit stages using the pen icon. You can change the Title (character limit of 255) and the Description for each stage. You’ll have access to a complete text editor for the Description, but we recommend keeping it brief so it doesn’t take too much of your widget content area.
Save & Close your edited stage.
You can also use the bin icon to delete a stage or drag and drop them to reorder.
As you move through the consultation, select Set as current to change that stage to Current and the previous one to Finished. Reordering a current stage will also change any previous stages to Finished, and you cannot set the final stage in your lifecycle as finished; it will remain as current.
Widgets are automatically saved and published to your project and listed in the widgets section of your project page. You can also use the drop-down menu to Show or Hide it on your project, the bin icon to delete it, or select the title to edit it.
