| Hi First contribution to the list (no pun intended...). I have had some experience with using Contribute and setting it up for a client. Contribute is a page editor. It's not a site manager or a CMS. It's to be used (initially at least) in conjunction with Dreamweaver. Having said that, it is brilliant at what it does. It is easy to use and explain to people. If they can use Word, they can use Contribute. Of course, there are some people who can't even do that, but we learn to be patient... Contribute's strengths are that it presents the user with a simple task: edit what's on the page. There's no need for a user to see the entire site structure, so they don't. Images are dropped onto a page and uploaded in the background. The site designer can limit the areas that the user can touch, and can also limit them to use only what's in the style sheet. You can allow someone to add a new page using the template you create, although obviously including that new page in any navigation system is an issue. Still, there must be something for us to do :-) Contribute will also read Word and Excel files, giving the user the option of importing the file as HTML or a table respectively, or linking to the files (which are uploaded in the background). THIS is nirvana for some of us. It has a "rollback" feature where old pages are saved and can be reinstated at any time. The number of pages saved back is set by the designer. It can also be set up to require edits to be approved by a reviewer. This is a simple system that's email-based. Contribute 3 can also do some simple image editing, such as resizing. All in all, Contribute is a brilliant piece of software that is perfect for small to medium sites that won't be changing structure often. The downside is, of course, that software must be purchased and installed which means that you can't give a user the ability to jump on any PC and edit their site, so if a client wants to fix up their web page from an internet cafe in Yurtistan or Upper Volta then Contribute probably isn't for them. This is a "customer success story" on MM's site (flash required). Contribute is also inexpensive. There is another component to Contribute that I haven't used, so I'll just quote from Macromedia's site: The Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) is a server application that provides central administration and tracking of user access and publishing activities on the website. CPS provides central management of site connections and access permissions, while server-based logging and e-mail notifications provide a deeper view into publishing activities. The Contribute Publishing Server allows web and IT managers to centrally manage users and website editing permissions. This new lightweight server application is easily installed in minutes on Windows, Linux, and Unix servers or it can be deployed to standard J2EE application environments. It enables administrators to centrally manage access to websites, integrate with enterprise systems using LDAP and Active Directory user directories, and track publishing activities across large numbers of websites and publishers. This may be the "server side" bit that others are referring to. Compared to other systems, CPS is inexpensive. My organisation (100 000 employees, couple of hundred editors, handful of "real" web developers) is in the process of rolling out Interwoven. It's big, expensive and very process oriented. It will take extensive training to use and feels very 'assembly line'. Cheers Martin.
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- [WSG CMS] Contribute as CMS? Martin and Merrilyn Curtis
- Re: [WSG CMS] Contribute as CMS? Geoff Deering
- Re: [WSG CMS] Contribute as CMS? Dennis Lapcewich
