A BEE Portal Site is a "living" website, as alive as you or your business. As a developer, instead of having everything in a set of static source files, you have an environment where you or the website owner run and manage the website.
A website largely contains multiple pages that look alike except a content area. For example, you may have a site that on every page there are a logo, a slogan, some banner images, a navigation menu, some links, a login form and a main area for contents. Even they differ only in the main area, you still need to duplicate all those common ingredients in every page. Many web development tools have facilities to make this process easier by ways of templates or else. With BEE, a new concept of Virtual Page makes the whole thing simple, natural, and the-way-it-should-be.
You first design a web page as usual, then insert the "hooks" to the BEE platform, namely, the Prelude, Head, Body and Application sections. They are mostly one-liners (except for the Prelude, which still has less than 10 lines). If you allow users to edit navigation menus and assign access rights to pages, you need a menu section, which is another "hook" to the menu object. There is an admin site under every BEE website (equivalent to a Control Panel). For your convenience, you may want to include some links to the admin site for you to click into its facilities.
From then on, all you need to do is to open your browser, login to your website as the "admin" user, and start creating pages, menus and modify settings as you go.
There are ready-made applications such as contact form and shopping cart, but you can still write or buy your own to install to your website (by uploading to the "appl" directory).
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