Review - Macromedia Contribute

The Weak Points

There are certainly some weak points in Contribute that you’d want to consider before choosing it as the updating software for your site.

First of all, it’s a client-side-only tool. So you can forget about making updates from that Internet café, or a PC that doesn’t have Contribute installed.

Contribute also requires that every user is individually licensed. Although the license price is very low, this could add up quickly for a site that has many contributors, unless each contributor buys their own copy.

If you have a dynamic site that extracts data from a database, or has content provided by a Web service, you won’t gain much from Contribute. Unfortunately (for Macromedia, that is), the most active sites today are dynamic.

It also seems to me that there is something wrong in the product’s publishing workflow progress system. Macromedia claims that contributors can send new pages, or page updates, for review by email. While they’re waiting for an answer, they can save the page temporarily and publish it once they receive a positive answer. Although I must admit I didn’t stretch Contribute to its full extent, I couldn’t find a way to prevent a user from publishing the page without the positive response from the administrator.

Who Will Benefit?

• If you’re building your own personal site, Contribute is a life-saver.
• If you have a static site that needs frequent updates, Contribute can save you a lot of time
• If you want to allow different content authors to collaborate without the fear of someone breaking the site design or code, you’ll find it very useful
• If you have a dynamic site with static sections that need updating, you can save a lot of time with Contribute
• If you want the clients of your Web development company to update their own pages without bothering you about, for example, the addition of a question mark, buy them a copy!

Who Should Look Elsewhere?

Contribute is surely not intended to handle very big or completely dynamic sites. If you want to be able to make remote Web-based updates to your site, content kept in a database, content feeds from other sites, a robust approve workflow, or complete management of your Web site through an application, Contribute won’t do much for you.

Summary

In summary, Macromedia Contribute is a very interesting tool that can save you lots of time in updates to your site, and provides advanced features like page versioning and team collaboration. I think that if Macromedia had released it 2 years ago, when dynamic sites were less popular, they would have sold millions. This doesn’t mean, of course, that it isn’t useful now, and with a price tag of US$99 it’s worth every penny.

Contribute is currently available as a technology preview. You can download it, try it free for 30 days, and decide for yourself if it’s what you need by the time it’s available for purchase in December 2002. Macromedia has a wealth of information about Contribute on their site. They’ve even set up a Contribute Development Center that contains everything from introductory information and how-to articles, to in-depth video tutorials. If you have additional questions about contribute there is a specific Contribute forum available as well.

Rating: 4.5 stars
Price: $99 per user. Education, government, and corporate volume licensing will be available as well.
Availability: English PC version in December, Mac OS X version in early 2003, French, German, and Japanese versions expected in 2003.
For More: http://www.macromedia.com

The Dreamweaver update to version 6.1 will also be available simultaneously with the shipping version of Contribute in December.