The separation of the text content from the page layout makes page sharing much easier.  You can have only one page, and have it automatically load different content into the TEA (Text Editing Area) based on the path-page of the URL.  In the "Hot news" example previously mentioned, the whole web page can be copied to another location in the web site with no modification whatsoever, and the new page will load a different content from the "text" class based on the path/page identifier.

If the web server is set up to redirect a page-not-found error to a template page, you can have that template page load the text content based on the path/page information obtained from the web server.  Only one page is needed as the template and you can have as many pages as you want, all with different contents and can be individually updated via the browser.

To take it further, you can even create pages through the browser.  Look at the following template page that the web server will redirect to on page-not-found.

<h1><beetext "headline" default="Page not found"></h1>

<beetext "content" default="Please check the web address and try again">

When a visitor request a non-existing page, say, http://www.mysite.com/news/sports.htm, the web server will display the above page with the default text.  However, if the visitor is logged in as the administrator, instead of the page-not-found text (the "default"), two Text Editing icons will display.  The administrator can then click into the TES (Text Editing Screen) and enter the text for each of the TEAs.

Upon saving the first TEA, the administrator has created the page by making the text item available in the "text" class.  No actual web page has been created on the web server; only a piece of new content has been entered.  That is what we called a "virtual page".

Note: In the current implementation of BEE, you can only submit a form to a Virtual Page using the "GET" method.