Hi Geoff,

The idea behind NM Content is to take something that you've (hopefully) already created as a part of the specification phase, and turn it into something useful right away in eZ Publish.

For content classes, this process starts with the ezclasspec tool (http://projects.ez.no/ezclasspec) where you can quickly and easily create a specification of the content classes required for your project. Compared to the process of creating content classes directly in eZ Publish, ezclasspec is designed to be fast and nimble, allowing you to use it as a tool in a client or internal meeting. When the class specification has been finalized, it can be imported as content classes into eZ Publish.

For content structures, we (Netmaking) have a habit of specifying them as nested, unordered lists, so we wanted something that could take those lists and provide us with a flying start, and that's what NM Content does.

With this in mind, NM Content can't really be compared with the packaging system, as the packaging system only works on pre-produced packages. For the class specification format communicated between ezclasspec and NM Content, the format could of course had been the packaging system, but we found it to be a little overkill with regards to what we wanted to accomplish.

Hope this was useful. Please don't hesitate to ask again if it was unclear.