Questions for Carter Museum (cartermuseum.org)

Hello Terry,

Again, thank you for your enthusiasm and kind words. I hope I can help spread some light on how some of site works for you.

1. Sticky/Description image

I'll start with the second half of the question. We made the image banners in kind of a dirty way, but it works. I just have revisited to make it a better way. Here is the code:

<?php
/**
 * Header image and link output by inspecting URL
 */
$acm_path_list = explode('?', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$acm_path_list = explode('/', $acm_path_list[0]);
$acm_headlines = array('home', 'visiting', 'exhibitions', 'calendar', 'works-of-art', 'blog', 'membership', 'support', 'teaching', 'library', 'about', 'press', 'store', 'search');
$acm_headline = 'home';
foreach ($acm_path_list as $acm_directory) {
  if (in_array('search', $acm_path_list)) {
    $acm_headline = 'search';
  } elseif ((in_array('cart', $acm_path_list)) || (in_array('authorize_net', $acm_path_list))) {
    $acm_headline = 'store';
  } elseif (in_array($acm_directory, $acm_headlines)) {
    $acm_headline = $acm_directory;
  }
}
if ($acm_headline != 'home') {
  $headline_directory = $acm_headline;
} else {
  $headline_directory = '';
} ?>

...<img src="/files/headlines/<?php print $acm_headline; ?>.gif" alt="<?php print $acm_headline ?>" />...

It appears that dark grey nodes are marked sticky, but they actually aren't. It's all done on the node theme level. Whenever you see a light grey box in a list of nodes like on http://www.cartermuseum.org/exhibitions, you really see the node preview. If you click on the title or image you go to the full node view. The full node view actually shows the rest of the node, and that's where you see the exhibitions' related artworks, podcasts, comments, press releases, tour dates, etc. Here is a piece of node-exhibitions.tpl.php:

<div class="node exhibition clear-block vevent<?php print $page ? ' sticky' : '' ?>">
  <?php print !$page ? "<a href=\"$node_url\" title=\"More on the exhibition $node->title\">" : '' ?><?php if ($field_image[0]['filepath']) : ?><img src="/<?php print $field_image[0]['filepath'] ?>" alt="" class="img-left-flush" /><?php endif; ?><?php print !$page ? '</a>' : '' ?>
  <p class="date-range"><?php print $field_ongoing[0]['view'] ? 'Ongoing' : acm_format_exhibition_dates($field_ex_dates) ?>
  <?php if ($field_traveling_dates) : ?><span class="travel-link">(<?php print l('View other venues', 'node/'. $node->nid, array('title' => 'This exhibition is traveling. View the dates and venues.'), NULL, 'travel');?>)</span><?php endif; ?></p>
  <h3 class="summary"><a href="<?php print $node_url ?>"><?php print $title ?></a></h3>
  <?php if ($field_copy[0]['value']) : ?>
  <div class="description">
    <?php print $field_copy[0]['view'] ?>
  </div>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

<?php if ($page) : ?>
  ...show the rest of the node...
<?php endif; ?>

What you see here is that the full node view adds the class "sticky."

2. Rotating Feature

I made a custom content type (cck) called homepage feature. This includes an image (image field modules), date range (date module - when to show up, when to go down), related node (cck - where this image links to; could have used the schedule module also), and weight (weight module - order of banners). The title of each feature node is what appears in the gray box above the image. I made a custom view that outputs the info into a list view. I used template.php and a theme override of the view to get it to spit out the code I want. The rotating was done using some custom JQuery. View source from the homepage to see this code. If you turn off Javascript and reload the homepage you will see that all the banners are accessible in a list.

3. Version

The site started out with Drupal 4.6 then really started moving with 4.7. We are up to date with Drupal 5.10. I would love to move to the latest version of 6, but many modules we use aren't available in 6 (mainly E-Commerce -- If it would have been available, we would have used Ubercart instead).

I really hope this info helps you in some way!