Terry's Second Site Tips

An Overview of Second Site
For Second Site 2

This page created 5 May 2008

Version note: Applies to Second Site 2

Some sections of my An Overview of Second Site article describe functions which have changed in Second Site 3. This article contains the information I formerly published for Second Site 2 where it is significantly different than for the newer version.

Adding Text to Your Main Page

Most users will want to add some text to the main page of their sites to describe and explain something their work. That text is entered on the Pages > Site screen, in the "Main Page Content" field. The field appears small, but you can click in it and press F7 to enlarge it to a convenient size for entering as much text you want.

What is entered is actually read by the program as HTML. This means you can enter plain text, but spaces and line breaks are ignored, and any formatting must be done in HTML. If you want more than a single paragraph, a few HTML commands that may be useful:

The same techniques can be used to add text in other locations on the various pages, such as headers, and footers. There are fields for adding "extra" content in the Layouts section ("extra" meaning in addition to whatever content Second Site would already put there).

User Items – Adding Other Types of Pages, and Managing Menus

In the Components of a Basic Website section we saw the several types of pages created in a default website. Second Site can create other types of pages as well, including several types of ancestor and descendant charts, several kinds of custom indexes, and totally custom pages of the user's design.

These additional pages are managed in the Pages > User Items section of the Second Site interface. This section seems confusing at first to some users, perhaps because it is used to manage two separate but related functions – the display of menus on your site, and the generation of supporting pages. Looking at that section for a default website offers some clarification:

In the window on the right, six User Items are present. The first three – Main Page, Surname Index, and Master Index – are essential parts of the site. The other three – Charts, Notable Ancestors, and Images – are optional. Note that only the last of the second group has a check mark in front of it, which is why the other two do not appear in our basic site.

If you compare the checked items with menu buttons at the top of the pages of our basic site, you can see that the same items appear, in the same order, on the menu. This illustrates one function of User Items, controlling the items that appear on the menu and their order. You can use the Up and Down buttons below the list of User Items to rearrange the order of the Items, they will then appear in the new order in the menu.

Looking again at the first three User Items, note that they have a small icon representing links of a chain. That is because they are "link" items. That means that they only serve the menu control function in this screen. Unlike the Items discussed below, you cannot manage the contents of those three types of pages from the User Items screen. You only manage how, or if, they appear on the menus here.

A few of the other User Items are also "link" items, and they also serve only to control menu appearances. For example, you could add a Person Link so that a menu button would take the reader to the Person Page entry for a key person.

The remaining types of User Items discussed here serve both of the functions of the User Items section – the control of menu buttons and the management of additional pages you are adding to your site. The last three Items visible in the screenshot above are examples of such Items. They are provided in a default site to assist users in creating the more commonly used types of added pages. Of the three, only the last, Images, is enabled by default. You can enable the other two if you want to make use of them, or you can add your own as discussed below.

Four types of pages are available:

• Charts – Are available in several styles, including pedigrees, ancestor and relationship charts, timelines, and box charts created in TMG. In each case, when people's names appear in the charts the names function as links to that person's section in the Person Pages, so readers can navigate to people from the charts. Further details for all the various types of Charts are available in Help.

• Indexes – Augment the standard Indexes included in the default site. A Place Index will take the reader to locations where a specific place is mentioned. The supplemental People indexes can be based on TMG's "Last Edited Date," a Flag created in TMG, or special event Tags you create in TMG. This last method is described as the "Index Person Method" in my article on Creating a Notable Ancestor Index. The other types of indexes are well described in Help.

You can also create an index of people using a user-created page. In fact, that is how the "Notable People" index which is included but disabled in a default site is created. That method is described as the "SubPage Method" in my article on Creating a Notable Ancestor Index.

• Exhibit Galleries – Are a sort of index to exhibits, displaying small "thumbnail" images of each exhibit. The Images page in the default site is an example of such a Gallery, in that case limited to primary images attached to people. There are controls available to include all sorts of exhibits, and to limit those included in a variety of useful ways. See Help for details.

• User-Created Pages – Include a virtually unlimited number of possibilities, and can be created either within or outside of Second Site. The following section describes the various ways to construct such pages.

Creating Custom Pages

There are three quite different methods for creating custom pages as part of your site:

• Externally Created Pages – Pages can be created totally externally to the Second Site program and then be linked to the site you create in Second Site. You create the link with a Link-Links User Item. A menu button is then added to your site to take readers to the external page. The external page can be a page in a separate site created in Second Site, or even a page in a totally separate website. Or, you could create a page manually, or with the use of a webpage editor, and make that page a part of your site created with Second Site.

This is probably not the best method for creating a separate page that you want to be part of your site created with Second Site, in part because it requires you to be sufficiently proficient in creating webpages to produce a workable page. Further, unless you are quite skilled in such techniques, the pages will not have the same "look" as the pages created within Second Site.

• Custom Page Item – Are created with an "Other - Custom Page" User Item. With this method, Second Site creates the framework of the page, and you supply just the body text or other content. If the content is more than a simple paragraph of text this method requires some knowledge of HTML and other webpage writing techniques, but the basic framework and the overall look of the page is created by the program. Second Site's Themes and other formatting tools are thus available to manage the appearance of the page.

• SubPage Method - Is a "building block" approach that allows you to assemble quite complex pages with no knowledge of webpage languages. The idea is that you create a page with an "Other - SubPage" User Item, then attach other User Items to that SubPage to create the finished page. The SubPage items designed specifically to serve as these "building blocks" include:

	SubPage Item Type	Use
	SubPage Text	Creates a section of text
	SubPage Picture	Inserts an image
	SubPage Heading	Inserts a section heading to divide other items
	SubPage List Type	Converts a list of other items to bulleted or numbered items
	SubPage Table Row	Creates a row in a table
	SubPage Icon Description	Creates a description of an icon used in the site

In addition to these items created specifically as SubPage items, the other items described previously can be used in a SubPage. For example, Charts, Indexes, and Image Galleries can be associated with a SubPage by placing them under a Subpage. When you do that only a link to them (and an optional description) appears in the SubPage – the actual contents remain on a separate page accessible by the link. Similarly, Link User Items, when placed in SubPages, result in a link in the body of the page, not in menu buttons. These Items then become "building blocks" in SubPages in that they become links within the body if the SubPage, and can be intermixed with the SubPage Items listed above to create more complex pages. The discussion of the "SubPage Method" in my article on Creating a Notable Ancestor Index illustrates this technique.

The following screenshot shows the Charts and Notable People Items which are included but inactive in the default website:

The Chart page was created by adding SubPage, Descendant Chart, and Pedigree User Items, then placing the two charts under the SubPage. That is done with the Left and Right arrows at the lower corner of the screen, or by dragging and dropping them. If we check the boxes in front of the Charts Subpage and the two Chart User Items, and enter ID numbers of the focus person for each Chart, we obtain the following Subpage:

I also added a brief introductory text to the SubPage, and changed the names of the two charts to make them more descriptive. In practice, if one has only one or two charts they could be placed at the left-most column in the User Item screen, where they would appear as menu buttons. But if there are several, collecting them on a SubPage as shown here keeps the number of menu buttons to a reasonable level.

The Notable People page was created by adding Person Link items and placing them under a SubPage. They then form links in the body of the subpage, similar to the "Charts" page show above.

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