Some of the most useful features in Sitecore are also some of the least well known. The longer you work with anything, the more you begin to understand it. With something as complex as Sitecore you really have to spend a lot of time learning what it can do before you start to really see how well it's suited to solving a lot of different problems.
Sitecore's sublayouts, for example, contain a wealth of technology that is not really documented, but it's the bedrock of an effective solution. The sublayout definitions in a presentation definition are where you determine where it appears on a page.
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