On Tuesday, Nov 12, 2002, at 04:43 US/Pacific, Robertson-Ravo, Neil
(REC) wrote:
> It is also interesting to note that the OSX version is not out till
> next
> year :-)......
Well, Windows is the more popular platform and Contribute has a fairly
tight integration with Windows / MS Office. Again, think about the
target market for this product. It makes sense.
I was part of the beta program back when I was still using Windows. I
loved Contribute for updating project intranet sites (I maintain two
and contribute to a couple of others). I also used it to maintain a
couple of personal sites. These are all static HTML (with a few web
forms). There are still a *lot* of static sites out there, especially
intranets. I'm looking forward to the Mac version when it becomes
available.
I would not expect Contribute to work well with dynamic sites - it
works by letting you browse to a page (just like a web browser) and
then editing it, at which point it downloads the page, lets you edit it
(pure WYSIWYG) and then you publish it, at which point it pushes it
back to the site with ftp (and makes a backup if versioning is
enabled). It's a client-side tool that uses a few key files on the
server to establish permissions etc. It uses the same
check-in/check-out mechanism that DWMX uses (a lock file on the
server). It's meant to be ultra-simple and easy-to-use.
It's not aimed at ColdFusion developers and I wouldn't generally expect
it to be able to edit pages on a CF site that delivers pages that don't
'match' the URL. If your site is essentially a bunch of static HTML
pages with .cfm extensions and just a few dynamic bits then, yes,
Contribute will probably do just fine (and there are a lot of CF sites
out there like that). If you use Fusebox, then your URL bears no
relation to the page (nor even the directory structure) so Contribute
is unlikely to be able to figure out which files to retrieve to enable
editing.
I've just rebuilt my personal site using Fusebox 3 for PHP and I've
taken advantage of nested circuits and layouts but Fusebox allows me to
completely hide the server-side directory structure. It seems pretty
obvious that Contribute would have a hard time with that - and it's not
designed for that. I haven't relaunched the site yet (maybe this week
if I get time to tidy up a few loose ends) but you can see the current
state of it at:
http://www.corfield.org/fb3/
However, there are a lot (a LOT) of people out there for whom
Contribute is 'just the ticket'. I was at a couple of the sneak peaks
prior to launch, not all of them at DevCon, and I heard IT managers
coming up asking about buying volume licenses so they could manage
their (static) intranet site by allowing end-users to update their own
content (under template control from the small and overworked web
team). That model makes a lot of sense. A lot of intranets contain a
lot of MS Office documents. Contribute makes publishing those things
much simpler.
I suggest folks read the articles on the Contribute Development Center
which include some case studies and explain the rationale behind
Contribute.
http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/contribute/
Sean A Corfield -- Director, Architecture
Web Technology Group -- Macromedia, Inc.
tel: (415) 252-2287 -- cell: (415) 717-8473
aim: seancorfield -- http://www.macromedia.com
An Architect's View -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
Introducing Macromedia Contribute. Web publishing for everyone.
Learn more at http://www.macromedia.com/contribute
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