Acquia's been working on ways to let people create really professional looking Drupal sites using only web-based tools.  One of those tools is the Rotating Banner module which just had its first release this morning.  What is a rotating banner?  I'm talking about those pretty slideshow type things at the top of most sites' homepages these days.  For a couple examples, check out http://acquia.com, http://kofiannanfoundation.org/, http://amnesty.org. This module was developed for Drupal Gardens by myself and James Elliot.

Core features:

• Various transition effects (fade, wipe, etc)
• A rich editor where you can pick a background image and add headlines and text areas with inline editing
• Pre-defined layouts for your text or a custom mode where you can drag and drop right where you want.
• Creates blocks, you can make a bunch of them.  Put them in sidebars, the header, etc.
• Can be a static size, or will grow to the size of your largest / smallest image or the size of the region you put it in automatically!
• Controls for switching between slides, or auto transition

Demo (click to view on YouTube):