Everything you see in this site was created by "out of the box" features in Second Site v2.0 (SS2). There are no customizations: the site was configured by choosing options in the SS2 user interface.

The main design goal of SS2 was to reduce the need for custom Themes, and to make modifications easier to implement and maintain should they be necessary.

The menus above demonstrate some of the new features that should reduce the need for customizations in Second Site.

  1. Sites can include a top menu (above the page header), a menubar (beneath the page header), a sidebar (near the content area, not used on this page), and a bottom menu (above the footer).
  2. The menus are controlled via User Items. User Items give users a high degree of control over the menu content. In this case, the User Items include some top-level items (as seen above), and some of the top-level items are SubPages that open a list of "nested" items. The nested items are visible on the page that appears when you click one of those buttons. "Indexes" and "Charts" open a list of indexes and a list of charts, respectively.
  3. The "Images" button is also a top-level item that contains nested items. In this case, however, the nested items are Exhibit Galleries, a new feature in SS2 that provides filtered lists of image exhibits, with SS-produced thumbnails. Check it out!
  4. The "Notable People" button in the menu at the top of the page is another top-level item. The nested items are links to selected people in the TMG database. This is an extension of the "Page.PersonHREF()" feature in SS1.
  5. Menu items can use graphic buttons or CSS-styled buttons. CSS-styled buttons are shown on this site.

In SS1, Themes controlled both the look of the site and the overall layout of the pages. In SS2, Themes control only the look of the site (images, colors, etc.). The layout is controlled with a new facility. There are more than 50 layout choices, and layouts can vary by page type. For example, the Person Pages on this site use one layout but the Chart pages use another. On Chart pages, the menu is on the side of the page.

There are also new Themes in Second Site 2. This site has a very different look, but it's just one of many Themes, with more to come. See the Theme Gallery for more information. Users can also supply their own graphics and styles.

In SS1, the user could supply extra content for the main page using the "Main Page Content" property. In SS2, the user can supply extra content for all pages, and the content can be in the page header, page footer, and other locations. The quote below is an example of that feature: it appears on each page after the page content but before the page footer.

There are many other features and improvements, too many to describe within the confines of this example site. Browse the site to get a feel for what you can do. You can read more about the new features on the New Features page.