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I have a newspaper-like site. I would like to present some articles specially. I thought to use a node queue for this. The first article should be presented as the top story, so I created a block for it and told that block to print the first node of the queue only, as a teaser.

Subsequent articles of the node queue should be presented as "normal" teasers, so I created a second block for them and told that block to print all nodes of the queue except the first, as teasers.

Now I want the top story to look different than the other teasers, and I believe that not everything can be done from CSS. For instance, the top story should have a larger thumbnail than the other stories. This means that I need to reference different images for the two types of teasers.

I have already created a module that implements hook_nodeapi so that I can frob teaser creation from PHP. So I think all I need is to somehow pass information into my implementation of hook_nodeapi that specifies which block the node is in.

But maybe it was wrong to use a module and I should have done it from the theme? I'm too much of a newbie to know what goes where.

(I have a need to frob teaser creation because the teaser includes the beginning of the node text, even if that text includes images. I made it so that it strips img_attach tags from the text before computing the teaser. While editors should have control of how to present images in articles, I want the to keep control of how to present images in teasers.)

Thanks.