What are Collections?
(lifted from the documentation on the Octopi Integrated Data Engine for WordPress, exclusively distributed via private commercial license)
If you're new to online products and marketing, you may not realize that there are only a few solutions available to handle your business lines effectively.
It will become clear that it takes significant effort, time and money to discover systems that can handle your most simple products; and if just a little complexity gets involved- basically when you need to grow to the next level, or offer something more than just a single download- you may find that unless you're a tech wiz yourself it's going to be a slow and painful process to achieve anything like you want.
One of the main focal points in our mission as we created Octopi was to offer reasonably simple administration tools. We believed that smart business people would be more successful and profitable online if they could focus on the sk**s they were good at, and had software that handled the techy stuff.
Sounds pretty simple, right? But it quickly became evident that some new means to handle complex business lines would be needed. The typical methods to handle product creation just wasn't going to cut it when doing online courses, interactive products, and things such as membership packages with multiple features.
So we made it our mission to create a system for entrepreneur groups, and particularly for solo-preneurs. It takes special stuff to rig a 40 foot boat for single-handed sailing. It's appropriate to think of our software like that for running a profitable business which is capable of going national with a single producer at the helm.
People really needed things to work. Fast, efficient, and smooth for the clients- simple, organized, and ahead of the curve for the staff, and progressive business maneuvers.
Fast-forward through a few months of software design and development and we achieved something unexpected- even for us. We finally managed to elevate the term Collection beyond a conceptual grouping of things, and we created it as a powerful command. Our solution is the way you use this command to create and use Collections.
But why are Collections important, and what can these actually do for your business?
First here's a definition:
The word Collection has a dual meaning in that it is used to describe related things, as in Data Collection and it can also refer to the things themselves, as in a Collection.
Consider how membership software is used to establish a relationship between clients and your business segments. These relationships are often called “Levels” such as creating a Membership Level and calling it the Silver, Gold or Platinum level.
When creating Products, or a**igning Membership Levels, or creating Online Cla**es and Courses, or even staging Live Events, there is a need to address the growing complexity as each of these Levels are built.
There are truly simple needs that nearly any software could satisfy. For example, if a “Level” consisted of a single Event date, let's say a concert performance, the model seems fairly simple. A person needs to be able to buy a ticket and gain admittance to the Event.
Taking a closer look at the Live Event scenario, there is still significant complexity even if there aren't any age restrictions- with live events one might need to stop selling tickets when a certain capacity is reached; there is info to deliver about the venue itself, a map, instructions about parking or other transit info, and special instructions if cameras or phones are prohibited; if there is a**igned seating rather than stadium or standing room only, then the ticketing system itself needs to be far more developed.
Taken altogether, the growing list of needs involved in creating a user experience doesn't really describe a single Level, Product, or Event. It becomes a Collection of properties, considerations, privileges and actions and even more things that are included.
Now consider an Online Event rather than a Live Event. In this case one set of complexity is traded for another as some technology is needed to ensure content is delivered only to paid viewers.
In our prefect world it will only take a click here-and-there to configure a Form to handle such things. In this imaginary perfect world, the Form method is one of the “typical methods” we described which fall seriously short of handling anything other than the most simple business lines. Still, for most practical uses given a simple business line, Octopi has just such a Form to be filled out and it allows the terms to be created quite easily.
However, we are not living in a simple or a perfect world. There are many what-ifs that can happen, and these are going to happen when you get a business idea. For example, what if you decide in addition to the Event you are going to extend the experience to include an after-show.
In real life this is where the excitement happens for ticket holders a**uming they can afford it, but in a much more practical sense where your online system is concerned this is where things start to get crazy.
We created our software for revenue production, monetization and marketing, and we chose to serve businesses concerned with providing a fantastic client experience. Our system deals with the way paying clients and new visitors alike are led through steps from initial contact to follow up email, from first purchase through ongoing relations.
The common problem here is obvious, but hard to appreciate unless one is a software engineer. It can be extremely challenging for good business ideas to translate to the web. Many businesses make IT decisions based purely on bottom-dollar thinking, and this has proven frequently to produce bottom-of-the-barrel profit margins. With your clients in mind what about usability? What about convenience and smooth flow? These advanced concepts require more sk** and experience to execute from a technical standpoint, but these have proven to translate into sales and sustained success in modern businesses.**
The technical problem exists that Computers, Apps, and Websites can only do what they're instructed. If some action falls out of bounds, either an error is generated and it breaks (bad programming), or perhaps some message is handed off which redirects someone to take a different action (good programming). However, in each of these cases, no real results were obtained. How can ordinary software handle complex business needs when everything from payments, to marketing mail, to your contact forms are outsourced, while none of the systems communicate together or really know what the other system component is doing. How does this create an effective business system?
Let's take the case of the Live Event again to drive this point home. Events use one of several multi-million dollar businesses offering ticket-sales and event staff. These have been around for over half a century in the modern sense, and they didn't get set up overnight. They can handle anything from small standing-room-only venues to giant multi-section stadiums, and they can even accommodate super special things like splitting the first 3 rows into specific per-seat pricing.
In order to reach all the potential concert-goers, this isn't about someone walking around with a clipboard shouting through a bullhorn, not even for the smaller venues. It might start that way and then at some point everything gets entered into a software system so that ticketing agents everywhere have some way to talk about and sell seating.
Then there's the Event staff handling everything from the crazed fans and fan-stalkers to liquor sales and product vendors as well as managers and security teams to handle the necessary legalities every step of the way.
Perhaps this point will make it crystal clear- when you create a Membership Level, or an online product that includes more than just a single download, or some type of Online Course which may include online and offline content, you will need to establish, train, and educate your “event staff” (your web system) how to handle all this stuff automatically, and this is going to look like addressing the configuration and administration settings in your system.
Contrasted with staging a concert performance where you just take down one performer's name and put up another, while the rest of the staff already knows what to do, effectively trained and instructed for the next Event, it doesn't work that way in your software.
The setup of a new product, level, or some online course is a completely different engagement altogether. In fact that's a pretty good description- it's like getting engaged, and each one could be just as hectic as a wedding if you aren't able to organize it in a sane fashion.
We built the Octopi Data Engine to provide a cohesive structure to organize your business as it grows, and conduct it using sane methods.
Using Octopi makes creating online products, courses, and membership sites manageable (actually we serve more than 7 different industries* ). Once you have configured a “simple” membership level or single product download for your members, it will become really clear for you just like it did for us that , it's just not going to work to continue with the endless options-leading- to-more-options-and-sub-options on a Form when you start to add more complex business lines to your system.
In practice with Octopi you are allowed to place the Collection command at the beginning of a list of pages, and it will treat all the list-items as a group, and this group will function together.
This becomes particularly powerful when you realize that the list items can be single Events, single Cla**es or entire Courses, Products, Downloads, Membership Levels- just about anything that can be individually addressed and a**igned as a single-type Collection can be re-packaged and combined with other segments in a greater sense, including other Collections.
Furthermore, each sub-level can operate independently so that you don't have to repeat sections, and you don't get penalized for duplicate content by Google. This same feature allows you to build related Cla**es, Courses, and Levels with value-added services and “plus” packages and “one-off” packages with very little additional time or administrative effort.
Best of all, because these things are organized in a Collection, you can view these at a glance in WordPress, and that helps to put everyone on the same page when you share the view.
With Collections in Octopi, you get to establish complex relationships between your product lines and your client base, and you get tools for easy administration of each step in the marketing model that serves your business.
So this is our idea about Collections born of necessity and the desire to handle ever-increasing complexity with sane real-world solutions.
If this discussion isn't technical enough for you, read more at our discussion of Data Hierarchies vs. Data Parallelism and how we support these directives simultaneously along with Autonomous Data and Decoupled Content in the WordPress environment.
(author Max Bellasys c.2013 copyright Bellasys Consulting Group 2013, All Rights Reserved)
* LMS/CMS/CRM available via SyllabiSoft.com; Apartment/Storage Management; Professional Teacher/Trainer/Coach Integrated Business and Marketing System with Automated SEO; Syndication Services and Agency News; Art/Boutique/Commercial Business and Marketing System; Membership/Subscription based system of any order.
Official Launch Slated for January, 2015 via http://octopide.com alias http://octopiide.com
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