Please do read the ports(7) manual page, which gives a good overview of this topic. There are two mechanisms to control the packaging of software according to different needs.
The first mechanism is called flavors. A flavor usually indicates a certain set of compilation options. For instance, some applications have a "no_x11" flavor which can be used on systems without X. Some shells have a "static" flavor, which will build a statically linked version. There are ports which have different flavors for building them with different graphical toolkits. Other examples include: support for different database formats, different networking options (SSL, IPv6, …), different paper sizes, etc.
Summary: Most likely you will use flavors when a package has not been made available for the flavor you are looking for. In this case you will specify the desired flavor and build the port yourself.
Most port flavors have their own working directory during building and every flavor will be packaged into a correspondingly named package to avoid any confusion. To see the different flavors of a certain port, you would change to its subdirectory and issue
$ make show=FLAVORS
You should also look at the port's DESCR files, as they're supposed to explain the available flavors.
The second mechanism is called subpackages. A porter may decide to create subpackages for different pieces of the same application, if they can be logically separated. You will often see subpackages for the client part and the server part of a program. Sometimes extensive documentation is bundled in a separate subpackage because it takes up quite some disk space. Extra functionality that pulls in heavy dependencies will often be packaged separately. The porter will also decide which subpackage is the main subpackage, to be installed as a default. Other examples are: extensive test suites which come with the software, separate modules with support for different things, etc.
Summary: Some ports are split into several packages. make install will only install the main subpackage.
To list the different packages built by a port, use
$ make show=PKGNAMES
make install will only install the main subpackage. To install them all, use
$ make install-all
To list the different subpackages available for a port, use
$ make show=MULTI_PACKAGES
It is possible to select which subpackage(s) to install from within the ports tree. After some tests, this procedure will just call pkg_add(1) to install the desired subpackage(s).
$ env SUBPACKAGE="-server" make install
Note: The subpackages mechanism only handles packages, it does not modify any configuration options before building the port. For that purpose you must use flavors.
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