The emergency module allows you to override the normal layout and content of your site in the event of an emergency. It is primarily designed for institutional websites (such as universities), but could be used by any site that needs to broadcast urgent information to visitors.
By declaring an emergency, non-essential block regions can be hidden and information related to the emergency (such as contact numbers) can be shown instead. This gives critical information more visibility, and allows you to quickly disable non-critical, bandwidth-intensive content to better endure increased site traffic. You can also define multiple emergency levels with different sets of overrides. For example, you could have a "closure" level that is used to declare a campus closure due to inclement weather, and a separate "public safety issue" level for life-threatening situations.
An entity collection can be used as a replacement for Node queue that works for all entities.
Pluggable backends
Entity collection has pluggable backends for storage. It comes with a DB backend but you can write your own backend for storing the entities. You select your preferred storage backend per bundle.
Fieldable
Entity collections are fieldable so you can add metadata to your collections (like descriptions and whatever you want).
Supports any entity
Entity collections can contain entity, and you can have more than one type of entity in them. This could be useful in some cases. You can also select which entity types you want to allow per entity collection.
Context aware
Each entity collection can have one or more required contexts. Each context can have it's own tree of items. This plays well with panels, so you can output your collections with different contexts using page manager.
Pluggable row styles and collections styles
Rows and styles are plugins and you can create your own if you want to. There is support for view mode row plugins and mini panels style plugins. Each row can have it's own style.
Sub-collections and single item rendering with mini-panels
The content api module is a resource for Services 3.x in Drupal 6. Content API exposes a new 'content' type resource to Services which implements an index and retrieve functions for nodes.