This page created 20 Jul 2008
Version note: Applies to TMG 6 & 7, and Second Site 2
This article is intended to provide an overall framework for understanding how Second Site works, and the various tools available to personalize the websites you create with it. Other articles in this group cover more specific topics.
Second Site is a program for constructing websites from data entered in The Master Genealogist – TMG. The data from TMG can be displayed in a variety of formats, and can be supplemented with information entered in Second Site if desired. The appearance of the website itself can be personalized with a variety of tools that require various levels of user skill to apply. This article describes the various tools offered by Second Site and how they work together to allow users with a range of skills, from novice to skilled website designer, to produce websites to meet their own objectives.
Sites created with Second Site may be posted on the Internet to be viewed by the world at large, or can be copied on to CDs or other media and distributed privately to family members. The descriptions in this article apply equally to either method of distribution.
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Topics Included in this Article |
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| How Second Site uses your TMG data | |
| The components of a basic website created by Second Site | |
| Choosing a different overall "look" for the site | |
| Options for the display of the data for each person | |
| Adding charts, custom indexes, custom pages, and more | |
| Creating custom pages as part of your site | |
| Further possibilities for controlling the "look" of the site | |
| Controlling how the elements are arraigned on each page | |
The topics in this article are arranged so that those I think will of the most interest to users appear first. I suggest you read only as far as the subjects are of interest, perhaps coming back later if you want to explore more advanced features.
Second Site builds a website from the data contained in a TMG Project. It accesses the data entered in Tags in TMG to construct pages displaying information about each person, as well as indexes, charts, and other supplemental pages. It accesses the Source and Citation data to construct citations in the website. Because it "understands" TMG's Sentences and Source Templates it can use these tools to format output just as TMG's own reports do.
Exhibits entered in TMG can be accessed by Second Site and placed in the site it creates (external exhibits only). Because the output of Second Site is in the form of web pages rather than paper reports, it can actually utilize more types of exhibits than TMG's paper reports. For example, websites can include PDF and audio files.
Because both TMG and Second Site require exclusive access to your Project files while they are working, you must close the Project in TMG before you open it in Second Site. Likewise, if you want to edit your data in TMG after examining your website created in Second Site, you must first close the Second Site file.
The Data section of Second Site's user interface allows you to control many aspects of which TMG data is used, and how is it used. For example, you can specify the people who are to be included, and which Tag Types are to be used.
The screenshot above shows the Data > Database screen, which is where you select which TMG Project is to be used, and then you can select which Tags will be used much as you would on the Tag tab of TMG's report Options. As with TMG reports, there are controls for how dates appear, which place elements will be displayed, when Memos will appear, and how Sources are to be used. Most of the controls for these elements found in TMG's reports are available in Second Site, in many cases with more options than offered for TMG reports.
Second Site creates a quite usable site with just a few basic steps. See my article on Second Site Basics for details on how to do that. Such a "basic" site created with the default settings will be surprisingly sophisticated. It will contain the following sections:
The default main page contains a site title, a menu bar for opening the other pages, compiler information, and some details about how the site was created. In the example above I've added a paragraph to explain what the site is about by entering the text in the Main Page Content field on the Pages > Site screen.
Clicking on one of the letter blocks takes the reader to the section of the Surname Index that contains surnames beginning with that letter. Clicking on a surname takes the reader to the section of the Name Index in which that surname appears.
Clicking on a given name takes the reader to the Person Page where the information about that person appears. The Name Index can also be accessed from the Master index, which shows the range of names on each Name Index page. That index is more useful for larger sites that require a Name Index of more than a single page.
There will generally be several Person Pages, each containing a number of people. For people who had children, there will be a list of children at the end of their section, similar to that produced by TMG's Journal report. By default, the data on the Person Pages is in narrative format, similar to TMG's narrative reports. Other formats are available – see the "Formats" section below.
The text describing each person will generally mention other people included in the site. The names of those people appear as links, and clicking on them takes the reader to the Person Page section for that person.
Citations entered in TMG appear as reference numbers in the text, with the citations listed below, as seen near the bottom of the screenshot. By default, those citations appear in TMG's "short footnote" format. The source numbers that appear at the beginning of each citation are links to the Source Pages. Clicking those links takes a reader to the section of the Source Page where the full footnote for that source appears.
The Pop-up Pedigree button under the person's name and summary information opens a pop-up screen with a three-generation pedigree for the person:
The names of each ancestor in the pedigree are links, which if clicked take the reader to that person's entry in the Person Pages.
Clicking on any image in the gallery will take the user to the Person Page for the person to whom the image is attached.
Having seen the basic website produced by Second Site, we will now examine some of the many ways users can modify the content and appearance of the sites they create to suit their own preferences.
The overall appearance of the site created by Second Site is controlled by the Theme selected. The Theme controls the background colors used, any graphics, and the size, style and color of fonts used for titles, headings, and text. The default pages illustrated above use the Simple Blue Theme. A few of the available alternatives are illustrated below:
Carla's A New Adventure
Mint Swirl
Nonzero Red
Themes are selected on the Stylesheets > Style screen:
The "'thumbnail" preview changes as you select different Themes to give you an idea of the general appearance produced by that Theme.
The appearance created by a Theme can be modified if desired using the methods discussed in the "Customizing the “Look” Beyond Themes" section below. Since most users don't feel the need to do that, we will address other features before we move to those more advanced options.
As seen in the sample screenshot of a Person Page above, those pages are where the bulk of the data we enter in TMG is displayed. By default, that data is displayed in Narrative Format, similar to TMG's narrative reports. But Second Site offers many other ways display the information. Two of them are shown in the following examples:
Bullets Format
Grid Format
There are several other Formats available, and for each there are a considerable number of options which determine exactly how the data is arranged. The Format is selected on the Pages > Format screen:
In this screenshot the "Narrative" format has been selected. The other options on this screen include whether TMG's Sentences will be used, whether a sentence naming each person's parents be produced, etc.
The available Formats will satisfy most users, but for those who want their site exactly "my way" it is possible to create custom Formats. My article on Customizing Second Site Formats offers some suggestions on doing that.
In the "Components of a Basic Website" section above 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, above, 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. If you use the Up and Down buttons to rearrange the order of the Items, they will 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. There is a discussion on creating Charts in my Refining Your Site article, and further details for all the various types of Charts is available 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.
There are three quite different methods for creating custom pages as part of your 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 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 (see the discussion on creating Charts in my Refining Your Site article for details), 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.
Most users will find they can obtain a totally satisfactory site by choosing from the variety of Themes available, as discussed in the "Choosing Themes" section above. However, some users want a site that is exactly "my way," or they just like to fiddle with such things. Second Site offers several methods, of differing degrees of complexity, to customize the results produced by a Theme.
Using the more advanced site-appearance controls is probably easier if you understand the concept on which those controls are built. Second Site uses a website technology called "Cascading Style Sheets." This techo-term actually contains its own definition. The "Style Sheets" part means that there sets of instructions, or styles, which a reader's browser uses to display the webpage. Something like this, to offer a much simplified example (which you may recognize as similar to what this page uses):
The "Cascading" part means the styles are in effect in layers, and the settings in one layer "cascade" to the other layers unless a different instruction is given for that layer. In the example above, the font style and background from the body style "cascade" to the page title, but the title uses it's own size, color, alignment, and type style. When one style layer receives it's characteristics from another, it's said to "inherit" them.
Extending this concept a bit farther in Second Site, selecting a Theme establishes a wide variety of styles. The user can choose to use all those styles, or modify specific ones. When you select a Theme, many of the styles used by that Theme are set in the Styles section of the User Interface. For example, the following screenshot shows the Colors and Background styles set by the Mint Swirl Theme:
You can change these styles individually, or those for Body Text, Headers, Menus, or Charts by making changes on the various screens in the Theme section. More specific changes can be made in the System section, where you can change specific characteristics of, for example, all Headers, Page Titles, or Footers. Note that changes made in that section apply to all pages – you cannot change just the Footers on the main page, for example, with this method. Examples of how I have used this feature to create the "look" I wanted for my own family history website, see the "Setting Colors, Fonts and the Like" section of my Controlling the Details on Your Site article.
There is another level of control available to the more adventurous. The Stylesheets > User section allows you to make changes to styles that are not possible in the Theme, Menu, or System sections. Using it you can change the style for the footers on just the main page, or the links that appear only on charts, to cite but two examples. Further, while Second Site uses hundreds of individual styles, only those expected to be most frequently used are made available in the other sections. The remaining styles can be modified by use of the User section.
Using this method requires more knowledge than those described above. You need to identify which style you want to modify, and then format the instructions for the change correctly. Some examples of how I used this feature are shown in the "User Styles" section of my Controlling the Details on Your Site article. If you are not comfortable with working with styles, you can always obtain help from from John Cardinal's Second Site support list, where John and other users are always ready to assist.
The options in the Layouts section of the Second Site interface control how the various elements of each page will be arranged on the page the reader sees. There are four related but separate features in the Layouts section, which are marked in the screenshot below with the arrows:
The four functions are described below:
Header |
Content |
Sidebar |
Extra |
Footer |
By default Second Site makes reasonable choices for this function, and most users will not have to concern themselves with selecting alternatives. The adventuresome, however, may wish to review this subject in Help and experiment. If you select a different Layout a small thumbnail outlines the resulting layout of each page.
Note that there is a section for "Default Layout" and then sections for each of the different types of pages in your site. As part of the Cascading Style concept discussed above, the layout selected as the Default is inherited by each of the page types unless something different is specified for the individual type of page.
Frames – Some users prefer the "framed" arrangement which places the Main Page, Person Pages, Charts, and other "content" pages in a larger pane on the right, while the Indexes remain always visible in a narrow pane on the left. For an example, see my Sample webpages. To use this arrangement, choose "Side by Side" in the Frames drop-down.
Static Content – Allows you to add content that doesn't change, usually text, to each of the five parts of the page mentioned above in the Layout discussion. For example, if you want to add a copyright notice at the bottom of each page, you might enter those comments in the "Extra Footer" section ("extra" means in addition to anything Second Site itself would place there, such as the compiler information visible in the sample pages at the top of this article). Content added on the Default Layout screen appears on all types of pages unless you check the corresponding "override" box on the screen for a specific type of page, in which case you can enter content that will appear only on that type of page.
This overview hopefully provides some insight into the ways in which you can customize a website created with Second Site to suit your own preferences. You may want to see my other articles on Second Site for some more specific ideas, or see Keith Winters' Gallery of Websites created with Second Site to see what other users have created. Second Site's excellent Help feature can assist in applying any of the techniques discussed here. Either browse Help from its Table of Contents, or access the Second Site screen in question and press F1 to open the associated Help page.
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