BluePrinting objectives

You can use BluePrinting for corporate brand management, for localizing Web sites, for delivering Web sites in different languages, and for synchronizing content.

In a BluePrint hierarchy, content is shared from Parent Publications to Child Publications. By sharing content, BluePrinting ensures consistent structure and look & feel to multiple Web sites. For example, organizational items such as Folders and Structure Groups are shared to provide consistent structure, templates are shared to provide consistent look & feel, and Components containing content and Schemas defining information structure (Web site content) is shared to provide a consistent branding message.

Before implementing SDL Tridion you need to establish the specific business objectives for an organization's Web sites (or content delivered through other channels) and carefully think through the design of your BluePrint structure to achieve optimal reuse of your building blocks.

Corporate brand management
In a BluePrint structure, your organization can establish and maintain branding using Page Templates, Component Templates, and Template Building Blocks. For example, a corporate brand incorporated in Templates can be managed centrally, in a Parent Publication, and applied to all Child Publications. While local content may vary, the corporate look-and-feel is maintained in each Publication.
Localized Web sites
A BluePrint enables your organization to create localized sites based on centrally provided content. For example, your organization may have several sites, all of which present a common feature article, but which also contain specific regional articles.
The feature article may be provided by the Parent Publication, while local content is created in Child Publications. This content can be combined into region-specific Pages. Further, the structure and design of the local articles can be maintained using centrally provided Schemas and Templates in the Parent Publication. This ensures that the structure of these articles is consistent between Publications while enabling the actual content to be specific in each Publication.
Web sites in different languages
A BluePrint can assist your organization in organizing language-specific Publications. Content to be translated can be shared through the BluePrint, and localized (translated) to be specific to a site. Further, original content can be created in Child Publications.
Synchronized content
Whenever you make changes to local content in a Parent Publication, the Content Manager automatically updates those changes in the shared items in all Child Publications as well.
If a Page uses shared Components, Page Templates, or Component Templates, and these items are modified in a Parent Publication, the newest version of this content can be republished.