greggles showed me how to make a view show different content to different users by role the other day, so I thought I'd write it down.

The goal: Displaying different nodes to administrators than I show to just authenticated users and that different than what anon users see. (In this case, I'll show pages to administrators, stories to authenticated users who are not administrators, and articles to anonymous users.)

The strategy: Create three different displays in the view, each of which is limited to a particular role, and each of which has its own filter. The administrator display has a filter that chooses pages, auth user one that chooses stories, etc.

The devil's details: The displays must be ordered by most restrictive to anonymous. The displays are apparently attempted in the order they're shown on the views edit screen. So we need the most restrictive (administrator) first. On that one only administrators will succeed. The next display has the authenticated users, etc.

I've attached a feature that demonstrates this. It provides a page, story, and article content type (provided in the feature) and a demonstration view. And some content in them. You'll need Features Module to try it out. But if you haven't tried out features yet, your life is draining away before your very eyes, so use this as a chance to try it out.

Thanks to all of you who pointed out on Twitter other ways to do this (with other tools):

• Panels knows how to do this easily using the CTools context system.
• Content Access and all related node access modules can do it by denying access to content (which we're not doing here; we're just affecting the display).

(And thanks Greggles for this great working solution.)

I don't think Context module knows how to change the primary content for a URL. It can do everything with the rest of the stuff on the page. Please correct me!