APEX Cultural

APEX Cultural is an image-led subtheme for museums, galleries, performing-arts organizations, cultural institutions, collections, and public programs built with APEX.

Its gallery-neutral charcoal and brass system pairs classical display type with readable sans-serif copy and provides five Single Directory Components for exhibitions, artworks, events, membership, and virtual experiences.

Let collections and programs lead

The theme uses generous space, restrained interface color, a 62-character reading measure, and natural artwork proportions. It keeps the APEX Theme page composition and 28 regions while adding Cultural-specific identity classes and design tokens.

Cormorant Garamond, Inter, and fallback families are declared in CSS, but font files are not included. Institutions must supply licensed assets or rely on browser-available fallbacks.

Five Cultural components

• Exhibition hero: an eager, high-priority exhibition image with title, curator, dates, venue, and primary and secondary destinations.
• Artwork card: natural-ratio collection-object presentation with linked artist and artist dates, title, year, medium, dimensions, accession number, image, and on-view status.
• Event listing: semantic date, presenter, description, time, duration, venue, and paid, free, or sold-out booking state.
• Membership CTA: one to three supplied membership tiers with benefits, price, recommended state, member count, and join destination.
• Virtual tour: poster, technology label, duration, description, headset-required disclosure, and a same-tab embed or new-tab launch destination for a site-provided video, AR, VR, or 360-degree experience.

Container-aware hero, event, and membership layouts adapt to available width while artwork cards preserve natural image proportions. Visible focus, reduced-motion, high-contrast, forced-color, and print adaptations are included.

These are presentation components. They do not manage collections, validate object metadata, sell tickets or memberships, enforce sold-out state, stream media, build a virtual tour, track visitors, or verify rights.

Current installation scope

The package includes three base stylesheets, two page wrappers, one settings override, five SDCs, eight standard optional block placements, and all 28 APEX regions. Its wrapper templates add classes and include the parent page composition.

The planned exhibition, event, and collection-object landing templates and demo content are absent. The front-page wrapper describes a cinematic concept but does not place the exhibition hero or any other component. The site must map its entities, collection system, media, Views, and commerce destinations.

Cultural-content implementation guidance

1. Define authoritative sources for object names, creators, dates, dimensions, provenance, accession data, rights, and on-view state.
2. Preserve meaningful artwork proportions and supply alternatives that describe relevant visual content.
3. Connect ticket and membership links to an accessible, reviewed transaction service.
4. Provide captions, transcripts, audio description, controls, and fallbacks for virtual media as appropriate.
5. Verify image, artist, lender, sponsor, trademark, and reproduction permissions.
6. Configure metadata, aliases, canonical URLs, redirects, sitemaps, and appropriate event or creative-work structured data separately.

Requirements and installation

• Drupal 11.3 or later within Drupal 11
• PHP 8.3 or later
• APEX Theme and its declared module stack

composer require 'drupal/apex_cultural:^1.0'
drush theme:enable apex_cultural
drush config:set system.theme default apex_cultural -y
drush cr

Accessibility, rights, and search quality

The styles include reduced-motion, contrast, forced-colors, and print accommodations. A cultural site must still test keyboard access, focus, zoom, reflow, image alternatives, captions, transcripts, media controls, event information, language changes, and screen-reader output.

Search visibility depends on unique curatorial and program content, accurate names and dates, stable object and event URLs, descriptive titles and links, canonicalization, metadata, internal pathways, valid structured data, rights-aware media, and measured performance.

Support and maintainer

Report reproducible issues through Drupal.org with the component, props, active APEX versions, Drupal/PHP versions, media type, browser, breakpoint, and exact steps.

APEX Cultural is created and maintained by Alaa Haddad, Drupal developer and architect at Flash Web Center, LLC.

Developed and maintained by Alaa Haddad of Flash Web Center, LLC.

AI disclosure: AI tools assisted with drafting and reviewing this project description. The maintainer verified the final content against the project source.