Terry's Second Site Tips

Customizing Your Site - Examples for Phrases and Icons

This page updated 22 Jan 2011

Version note: Applies to Second Site 3 & 4

This is one of a group of articles providing examples of how I used the capabilities of Second Site to customize my site as I preferred. This article deals with modifying some of the standard phrases used by Second Site, and adding a custom Icon to the top of each page. My objective in adding the icon was to match the appearance of the other pages on my personal website, which are very similar to those on this website. While you may want different results, these examples may illustrate methods you may find useful.

Other articles in this series can be found from my Customizing Your Site - Examples page.

Changing Second Sites's Standard Phrases

Many of the words and phrases that Second Site produces (as opposed from the text produced by Tags in your TMG data) can be easily edited. Second Sites's Strings section contains a long list of phrases used to construct your site. These fields are initially populated with standard terms in the language you select when you initially create your site definition - Language Issues in my Special Issues article. You can then edit any of these phrases if you prefer. Here are some I like to change:

• Strings > Name Strings
  I prefer that the indexes to display missing surnames as "(unknown)" rather than the default "(--?--)." So I edited the "Missing" field to read
         (surname unknown)
  This also changes the way missing names are displayed in the people pages, but my primary interest was in how they looked in the indexes. Because this string also is applied to given names, this will not work well if you have people in your site with missing given names.

• Strings > Page Strings
  I like the TMG ID number on the line below each person's name to read "ID#" instead of just "#." So I edited the "ID Prefix" field to read:
         ID# 
  The code at the end creates a space between the text and the number itself.

In order to delete the "Person Page" subtitle on each person page, I deleted the text in the "Person Page Name" field.

• Strings > People Strings
  In the lists of children under their parents, I disliked the " + " sign after the name of those children who are included on their own pages. I thought that the distinctive font used for their names as links was a sufficient clue to readers. So I removed the text from the "Children Indicator" field.

• Strings > Place Strings
  I like the place preposition "in" instead of "at," so I made that edited the "Default Place Preposition" field to read:
         in

These are just a few of the many ways you can customize your site. If you see phrases you would prefer to change, look through the Strings section. You can most likely change them to something you would prefer.

Setting Up a Site Icon

Themes control the general "look" of the site - the colors and graphics used on the site. There are a variety of standard Themes that provide several distinctly different overall site styles, including in some cases fairly extensive graphics. But I prefer a fairly simple style of my own design. So I start with the Plain style, which is designed to be a simple foundation for user customization. In addition to the changes to fonts, spacing, and colors that I made as described in other articles in this series, I wanted to add my site's trademark "ReigelRidge" house on a mountain graphic.

Adding such a graphic as a "Site Icon" is pretty simple, once you locate or create a suitable graphic image. It's done as follows:

• Starting with a GIF, JPG, or PNG file, rename it to siteicon.gif, siteicon.jpg, or siteicon.png, as appropriate, and place a copy of it in the "-i" (input) folder for your site.

• The Site Icon image will be used for all pages. If you want different icons on some pages (you may want to use a smaller version on pages other than the main page), use the following file names (add .gif, .jpg, or .png as appropriate) to use icons for specific pages:

• By default the icon will appear to the left of the site title and page title, with the vertical placement of the text depending on the height of the icon. I wanted the site title to be centered vertically with the icon, so I made two changes on the Stylesheets > System > Site Icon screen. In the "float" field I selected:
        None
  In the "other" field I entered:
        vertical-align: middle;

Conclusion

While each of these examples is specific to my own preferences in how my site should appear, hopefully the offer some suggestions for changes you might want to make in your own site.

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