After looking at multiple templates in Sitebuilder, it is starting to appear that they were constructed more as visual canvases, not html pages. The html mechanism is there, but the way backgrounds, text boxes, images and navigation are constructed is reminiscent of the layer composition found in a word processor document.

This would go a long way to explain the lack of separation between body elements and page content, and the lack of controls to standardize position and width. Almost everything is drag and drop, and the basic underlying page elements can change from page to page.

The initial canvas for content in a SiteBuiler "page" is transparent, letting the body color show through. The Edit:background menu controls it. Just below that is Edit:Page Properties, which has no background color/image controls, and since background was set in Edit background, it seems likely that both refer to "page".

There is another "Change Background" option in the page context menu, (select the page itself and right click, 4th item down). However both background setting actually refer to the tag style.

To make your SiteBuilder "page" a different color from the body background, it is possible to paste the css into the page's HTML head. Click in the page, right click to open the context menu, paste the style in the head section of the context menu options.

The simplified template approach used by SiteBuilder is intended to make editing easy for people who don't want to worry about html and css. But when drag and drop causes centered pages look jerky and page formats are difficult to standardize, there are a couple of work arounds.

While I can't recommend SiteBuilder, there are at least 3 or 4 things that will make editing easier for someone who has created drag and drop pages.

1) SiteBuilder's "Arrange" menu has options for a grid. Select "show grid", and you see some "ruler" types of lines. They they don't show up in preview or in published files, and they offer a calibrated way to tell where you are in the page.

2) If you select an image, and right click, it brings up a screen to set the image's horizontal and vertical coordinates. These are absolute values relative to the top left corner.

Yahoo's free html editor, SiteBuilder has drag and drop editing, and can preview files and publish to a yahoo hosted site. Unfortunately, as editing tools go, it has some major drawbacks.

There are a lot of "templates", but the css that drives the "look and feel" isn't readily accessible to the editor. In addition, some of the mechanisms associated with the drag and drop to create display problems.

The editing screens that say they set the page width, are not synced to coordinate with the center wrapper widths.

Although this blog is mostly to illustrate the uses of drupal, it is also a place to talk about some of the current trends.

As of March 2010, Blogger, Google's entry in the earliest on-line blog systems, will discontinue FTP editing for accounts hosted elsewhere. Blogger, still offers free blogs, and will allow a "custom" domain blog, presumably on their own hosting, but will no longer allow users to use the blogger editor to publish via FTP to their own domain.

While Wordpress offers a one-click update (at least most of the time), Drupal still requires the administrator to delete folders and update the whole installation. This is a roadblock for non-tech users who would otherwise user drupal for their sites.

While it is unclear whether this represents major changes to the underpinnings of the program, an abundance of caution, a rigorous demand that the administrator be tech savvy, or simply a method of simplifying coordination of a product with multiple maintainers, it is something to consider when thinking about what CMS to use.

Since 2005, when I set up examples of drupal, blogger and Word Press, these programs have changed. Drupal has developed in two directions, a trimmer CMS that has up to 5 fields for user "profiles", and a sister software at civicspacelabs.org,
2009 Update

It is 2009, content management systems continues to morph. Drupal has incorporated some of the user controls that were developed in Civic CRM, which is no longer an independent program. The last time I used drupal, it had 5 levels of user control, and the ability to add custom types of users, each with a custom level of access.

Somewhere I've read a fairly important piece of advice that can be paraphrased as "Be careful what you write on-line, it is forever". But you say, "It's only an electronic page, I'll just take it down". The fallacy in that is that the page you see is not the only copy of the material that exists. Web page information is stored in servers, which in the normally course of things make back-ups. Your rant on the boss may exist on a server in North Carolina, and because it was public information, it can be researched and reproduced.