Martin and Merrilyn Curtis wrote:
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.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/cs_video/penske/
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.
Thanks, probably MM is heading in the right direction with CPS. It
would be great if you could provide them with feedback about features
they need to add / work on. If they are going in the direction you
imply, that's great. But they'll need constant feedback. I don't know
how open they are to that presently.
As a follow on, I wish NVU had have addressed some of these issues. I
think the developers that were involved in the initial fork were open to
address many of these issues, but the FTL (Fearless Team Leader) was not
so open to them.
---------------
Geoff Deering
*********************************************************
The CMS discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
*********************************************************
