Since September I’ve been working on extending the under utilized Drupal Help Edit module. The module was designed to display custom help messages on pages in a site, in addition to the standard Drupal help. It was designed to be easy to use for site administrators letting them add to the help messages built into Drupal with messages that are specific to their site, and the people who visit it.

Eric and Ian have used this module on a site they did for AU (http://www.aupeace.org/jobs), not simply to supply additional help message but to also provide links to related parts of the site, making it easier to put the job listing on the site to use. When you look at the job and internship listings on the AU Peace and and Conflict Resolution site you’ll see links to pages about searching and posting jobs. That content is put there by the Help Edit module, so while the module was initially designed to provide snippets of help here and there, really it can be used to provide any type of content – text, links, maps, images, anything.

The changes I made to the Help Edit module let you further customize the delivery of this custom content and make it more focused and meaningful by controlling not only when it’s seen, but also who gets to see it. By applying role control to Help Edit each kind of user can see help which is useful to them.

On a site like AU Peace there are a number of kinds of users; anonymous visitors (like prospective students), logged in users (students, Alumni, practitioners), content managers (work study students working in the main office), site administrators, etc… We want each kind of user to see it’s own set of context specific messages. When a jobseeker and a site admin look at the same page we don’t want them to see the same links and help on the page, each one wants something different, and we want to provide that.

When an anonymous user sees a site we may want to provide some text and links directing them to a part of the site which gets them involved, when a user with an account on the site sees the page we can show more involved information such as subscribing to job updates. Of course this kind of control can also be used to refine the kind of real help message that are shown to users; reminders and warning messages to content managers, and administrators which aren’t seen by other users.

Adding this level of control to Help Edit is a way to further customized the experience a users has with a site based on who they are and what we know they’ll be looking for. Not only can it make the site easier to user, but also more useful.