HTML Exhibits

There are a number of ways to add HTML pages to a site. If the HTML is associated with a TMG record, you can store the HTML in a text exhibit. In this case, Second Site will copy the text to an HTML page and if the applicable exhibit property is set to "Link" (rather than "Embed"), SS will make the page and create the appropriate link. Second Site has special code to detect that a text exhibit contains HTML and if so, it takes care to make that HTML integrate with the HTML created directly by SS.

Here are the steps to add a text exhibit that is associated with an event or a source and contains HTML. These instructions are specific to TMG Version 5, but the basic steps apply to all TMG versions.

Open the event or source associated with the HTML content.
Click on the binoculars icon in the upper right hand corner of the window. The Exhibit Log window will open.
Right click on the blank portion of the Exhibit Log, which is the middle section of the window.
Select one of the choices beneath the "Insert new text" option in the menu. The choices are:
- Internal text
  Use this to type text that will be stored in your TMG project. TMG will open a text window and you key the text.
- Import to internal text
  Use this to copy text from an existing file into a new exhibit. TMG will ask you to select a text file. You can select any type of text file, including files with an HTM or HTML extension, but you have to choose "All Files" from the "Files of type:" pull-down menu before you will see them in the dialog window.
- External file
  Use this to identify a text file whose contents will be the contents of the exhibit, even if the text file is changed after the file is added as an exhibit. The process of selecting a file is the same as in #2.
Which you choose is really up to you. Choose either #1 or #2 if you want TMG to manage the text for you. Choose #3 if you want the text to be stored in a file that is external to TMG.
After you create the exhibit you should set the properties. Right-click on the exhibit in the exhibit log and select "Properties". Then key a brief description in the "Topic" textbox. Key a description using the big textbox on the Description tab. SS supports captions for text exhibits, so you can provide one if you want; the caption displays with the exhibit much like a caption for a picture. Click [OK] when you are done.
After you add the exhibit, close the open windows in TMG and start Second Site. Open the SDF file for the site, which I presume you have created already. Check your exhibit options. Start by setting the Data.Exhibits.Event Text property to "Link". With the option set that way, each text exhibit gets its own HTML page. A document icon at the end of the sentence (or grid entry) for the event is a clickable link that will open the page that contains the text.
Make the site. Navigate to one of the principals for the event. Click the icon that follows the sentence for the event with the linked exhibit to open the linked exhibit.

To compare linked exhibits to embedded exhibits, change the Data.Exhibits.Event Text property to "Embed" and remake the site.

The advantage of the method described above is that Second Site will do most of the work for you in terms of managing the content and including it in the site. The disadvantage is that TMG will not be able to do anything very useful with the exhibit unless you restrict yourself to HTML output. That's not really the fault of TMG, rather, it's a direct result of choosing the HTML format. Having said that, HTML is a good choice for text exhibits where you need control over the format of the content. For example, if you want to create a table (a grid of rows and columns), HTML is an obvious choice. TMG's formatting codes will let you create bold text, italicized text, etc., but you can't really create tabular output.