The CIP Sitemaker Editing Suite has a cleaner, brighter look and feel, with improved navigation and access. Illuminated tabs and buttons show where you are in the editing suite. Task bars are now consistent from page to tool to themes... Settings, Layout, etc...

Shifting components is much improved with better relationships between independent components and containers that include multiple components. When editing components a folder and tab motif lets the editor toggle between the settings and content forms for the component.

Want to change the look of your site? Sitemaker now has a comprehensive "Themes" capability. All visual aspects of the site are now completely separate from the content. Create multiple themes and activate any new look at any time, confident that all your information will be presented correctly with the new appearance.

Preview (test drive) your themes to compare options privately before you change the public view of the site. Previously you could have one custom theme, and you could choose various pre-configured Sitemaker themes. Now you can have up to six custom themes. Base each theme on a Sitemaker theme or create your own theme from scratch. Create variations on one of your themes for seasonal use, for special events or promotions, or just because they look cool.

A new layout for Layout! A tab & folder motif contains settings for themes, page templates, title, contents, text and styles. It's easier than ever to control the look and feel of your site.

More page elements have class names and unique IDs to give advanced (Expert) users more style sheet control. use a style sheet to control precise positioning of elements and their color, size, font, etc.

Component placement has been standardized with no arbitrary space around components, so the size you specify is the size you get.

Access to the site title area of the page lets you create a custom site title. Use combinations of background graphics, tables, links, styles, etc., to define a completely unique header for your site.

Forms are improved with new features

• questions may be numbered
• questions may be sorted
• questions may be hidden
• options (radio buttons, popup lists, multiple selections)
  -- add, delete, sort, hide/show, set default
• question groups are surrounded by a fieldset border

The email engine that sends your forms has been completely rewritten. Forms are less likely to be rejected by a improving anti-spam filters. Sitemaker forms continue to avoid creation of spam, as addresses are not revealed to the sender.

The Sitemaker Calendar tool has been extensively rebuilt. Adding an event is much easier, and it is almost identical in the Editing Suite and by readers at the site owner's option. If reader submission is enabled, a WYSIWYG preview step lets the reader edit and correct the new event before submitting it for publication.

Recurrent events are now fully supported. Set your events to recur daily, weekly... for a given number of repeats (including skipping intervals like every other Tuesday), until a date, or even forever.

List or monthly views are available. Display the events for any month, or show the next 20 events (starting about four days before the present by user request).

The calendar displays all events correctly in their proper sequence, whether once or recurrently. Work-arounds have been added to handle peculiarities of Internet Explorer.

Multiple calendars are supported. You can download other calendars related to the purpose of your site and then integrate them into your calendar list. They can be displayed either individually or in an integrated list.

The calendar uses standard "iCalendar" files, complemented by a unique interface for ease of data entry and event management. The system uses an open-source engine to read and display the events, and that software is regularly updated to the latest version. Technical changes in Sitemaker Version 2.0 have increased the speed of calendar display.

If you use an iCalendar-friendly desktop program like Outlook (Windows) or iCal (Mac) you can maintain your calendar off line and upload it to your web site. This lets you incorporate special features and options of your desktop program, e.g., irregular scheduling patterns.

Links can now be displayed in several formats, with and without graphic icons, titles, synopses. As before links can open in the same or a new window.

A tool for creating and managing lists of links is under development for a future release.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are further developed in Version 2.0. Sitemaker builds a CSS for each page on the fly. Now for each site and each page there is a Style Sheet option that lets you override any standard Sitemaker class (there are many) with site-wide or page-specific styles and apply them in the settings of any component. Each custom theme has its own style sheet, too, so when you experiment with alternative appearance you can truly make each theme unique. You can even override any component's Sitemaker-generated class name with its own unique class name and define it in the site or page style sheet.

Now you can do any cool graphical or text transformation effects you can define. Use rollover buttons, text highlighting or background colors to emphasize or link content.

CIP Sitemaker™ now gives you all the power of a hand-coded site with the innumerable advantages of a solid content management system.