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Compound Template design plan

Selection, organization, visualization, and publishing define a typical sequence of steps that turn content in the Content Manager into a Web page published to a Presentation Server and served to a Web site visitor.

The example scenario in this diagram distinguishes a number of steps:

Selection
determines which content items (Components) to include on the Web page. This step may consist of a content author or editor selecting actual Components ( static selection), or it may consist of defining a set of selection criteria to execute when a visitor visits the Web page ( dynamic selection).
Organization
determines how Components are grouped together. For example, given three groups of Components: news articles, product descriptions, and links to related articles, it might be decided to put the first two groups together, while keeping the links separate.
Visualization
determines how the Components will be laid out on the Web page, and how the various fields of each Component will be visualized.
Publishing
turns the selected, organized and visualized content into an actual Web page. This last step not only involves transporting the Web page to the actual Presentation Server, it also involves publishing supported files, such as screenshots or CSS files, and turning links between Content Manager items into links between published items.

Depending on your implementation, you may wish to modify or extend this sequence. For example, you might wish to turn the selected content, not into a Web page, but into an e-mail message to send out using SDL Tridion Sites's Outbound E-mail functionality.