Time and time again, we have been asked to provide helpful messaging to the users of a website we've built. Since there has been no obvious choice of contrib modules that provide this, we usually (along with most of you, we assume) just add some custom code on our site somewhere that displays a message, or perhaps generate a custom block that contains the text we want our users to see.

Well, we finally had enough of continually building custom solutions to a perennial problem, so we built a module for that!

Introducing Helpful.module! This module extends the very popular Advanced Help module. One might think you could use Advanced Help to provide help to regular users. In fact, the module is only designed to provide help about Drupal site building, not for using the site itself. This module solves that problem.

Helpful.module allows site builders to easily generate help topics that can be displayed as "messages" or pages, that can be accessed by regular users. It provides a new permission, "Access helpful information", that lets you provide these special Advanced Help topics to any role you wish. It lets you use Advanced Help's standard *.help.ini file and static HTML files to generate this helpful content, making it a breeze for non-developers to use.

In addition, Helpful Hide is an added module in the package that provides a "Hide" link on all help messages, letting users that already know what they are doing to get rid of the help messages!

Check out the helpful_example.module, available in the download package, to see an example on how to write help for your website.

NOTE: Helpful.module requires a small patch to Advanced Help to work. If you would like the patch to get in, please chime in on this issue if it works for you: http://drupal.org/node/1471092 Hopefully, with a few "Works for me!" posts, and a little leaning on merlinofchaos, we'll get the patch in! This will open up the possibilities to extend Advanced Help in other ways as well.

Tags: Planet Drupalmodules