Review - Macromedia Contribute

Do you want to be able to easily update your site through a friendly interface, or give your clients the opportunity to update the sites you created for them without the fear of them ruining the design or server-side code? Do you want to benefit from using a team of content authors to keep your site’s content fresh?

If you update the pages of your site by hand and upload the files to the Web server using an FTP client, or you want to avoid the hassle of using several different tools to create, publish and update content online, Macromedia claims it has the solution for you.

What is it?

Macromedia Contribute is a new client-side tool that allows Web developers to maintain control over a site, while giving content editors the opportunity to update their own content, even if they don’t have a clue about HTML or FTP.

Contribute is designed to be installed on a PC with an available Internet connection, and uses FTP to transfer the complete pages to the Web server. An administrator can set up profiles of users that will update the site content, and also has the power to restrict their actions as he sees fit. Users and site settings are maintained on the Web server in the form of XML documents so that different installations of Contribute can enforce these permissions and preferences.

All a user has to do is install Contribute and insert the special connection key that the administrator has created for them and supplied encoded through email. As soon as they’ve inserted their key, the user can start browsing the site and editing pages on the site. The connection key actually contains all appropriate FTP and other settings, so users are relieved of these tasks, and can get down to business immediately.

The Contribute Browser Toolbar

The interface of Contribute resembles a Web Browser. A user navigates to the page they want to update and hits the edit button. If they’re authorized for this kind of action, the browser changes to an editor with a toolbar that, to some degree, resembles Microsoft Word. Through this toolbar the user has all the text formatting options they need, as well as HTML table creation options, image and hyperlink insertion, spell checking (in many languages) and control over page properties such as text and link colors, background images and encoding.

The Contribute Editor Toolbar

Contribute’s Main Features

The main features of Macromedia Contribute are:

• Easy creation and updating of pages that contain text and images
• Easy publication of complete pages to a live Website
• Content updates by content authors without the assistance of a developer or Webmaster
• Collaboration between a team of content contributors
• Protection of server code
• Enforcement of site design standards
• Enforcement of accessibility standards
• Page versioning
• Offline editing
• Integration with Dreamweaver MX

The Strong Points

Macromedia claims that Contribute changes the Web from a read-only medium to a read/write medium: Contribute is so easy to use that no special knowledge is required to publish content. As a consequence, you don’t have to be a Webmaster to display your work online.

While Contribute is indeed, in my opinion, a very easy and convenient Web publishing tool, Macromedia isn’t the first to think of creating a tool to make Web publishing easy. There are already many small and large Content Management Systems and various stand-alone publishing tools that promise Web publishing without special programming knowledge.

Contribute does have several strong points, though. First of all, it removes the hassle of using different tools (HTML editor, FTP client) to just change that misspelled email address, for example.

Secondly, you can have several users update your site simultaneously: Contribute will automatically check whether the pages a user is trying to amend are already being edited by others, in order to prevent page version conflicts. In addition there is a page rollback feature which allows easy recovery from possible problems by reverting to a stable version of a page.

In addition to that, you, as an administrator, can make sure that none of the users break the code or the style consistency of the Website. Moreover, you can ensure that new updates will be consistent with current accessibility standards.

Another great advantage of this product is that templates created with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX can be used in Contribute as well. Dreamweaver MX recognizes sites that are set up with Contribute, allowing designers and content authors to work together. This functionality is added to Dreamweaver MX through a free update that upgrades Dreamweaver MX to version 6.1.

Finally, users can import Word or Excel documents into Contribute by simply dragging and dropping them into its editor, Contribute then publishes all changes and files to the Web server with a touch of the “publish” button.