Everything you see in this site was created by "out of the box" features in Second Site v2.1 (SS2). There are no customizations: the site was configured by choosing options in the SS2 user interface.

The goal of SS2 is to allow users to demonstrate the fruits of their genealogical research in a compelling way. To do that, users need a tool that takes care of the dirty work for them—by creating pages from their TMG database, for example—but also provides a rich feature set for adding content that makes a site come alive.

Here's a short list of features that are demonstrated by this example site. Explore the menu entries above to see and learn more.

  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.

I have added other comments about how this site was created to various pages on the site. Those comments were added using facilities that are part of Second Site 2.

In SS2, you have control over the Theme (background images, colors, fonts, etc.) and the layout (the arrangement of content on the page).

The Theme Gallery shows the Themes that are supplied with SS2. Users can also create their own graphics and styles.

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.

In SS2, the user can supply extra content for all pages, even pages that are generated primarily from content in your genealogy database, 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, too many to describe within the confines of this example site. Browse the site to get a feel for what you can do. Second Site 1 users can read more about the new features in Second Site 2 on the New Features page.