Macromedia Contribute - Your experience?

[wwaters]

Does anyone have experience using MM Contribute to allow different branch offices of a company to make regular updates to particular pages, and occasionally add a page (to showcase a special promotion, for example).

How well does it work?

In our case about 7 people would be updaters, on a site of about 100 pages; but most would only be updaters for their city -- can access be restricted by user to particular pages?

Any observations regarding this program would be helpful and appreciated.

Note: We don't want "updaters" to be able to change design, or "look and feel" aspects of the site. Only add text, images and links.

[sonjay]

You can restrict specific users to specific directories in the site, but you can't do it on a file-by-file basis, nor can you exclude specific directories or files. Which means that if User A needs to be able to update a page in the document root of your site, User A will necessarily have access to the entire site. If User A only needs to update pages in /docroot/departmenta/ then you can restrict the user to just files in that directory. This is a pretty severe limitation if you've already got a site that has all or most of its files in the document root. Macromedia's work-around is for you, the Dreamweaver user, to check out all the files you don't want your Contribute users to touch, and just don't check them back in. Contribute won't allow the user to edit a page that someone else has checked out.

There are other limitations, too. Contribute allows no access at all to underlying code, so don't expect your users to be able to edit form input tags, or anything else that would involve touching the code. You can restrict your Cont. users to using html styles only, css styles, neither, or both, but any such styling is applied by choosing "bold" or "italic" or whatever from the menu. Also, you can make your stylesheet available to them or not. This is all set up when you enable the site for Contribute use.

Contribute is excellent for people who need to make occasional text modifications, but I don't think it's a good tool for more than that -- placing images, for example. The Contribute user can be allowed or not allowed to place or change images on a page -- but if you allow it, you have potential problems. You can limit the filesize of the images they're allowed to place, in kb, but you can't limit the image by dimensions. So your clueless Cont. user can place a 1000-pixel wide image on the page in the spot where you've allocated 250 pixels, and the entire page gets blown out.

Also it's a challenge to code your pages so that the Cont. user can edit what they need to without messing up the page. Are your users savvy enough that when they've deleted a headline -- thus deleting the h1 tag -- and typed in a new headline, they'll know to choose h1 from the menu up top? You'll find that you have to do things like put the editable headline area inside the h1 tag, so that your Cont. user can delete headlines at will and type in new ones without losing the header tag. You end up having to create a multitude of editable areas for each page, to segregate out the editable areas to the smallest pieces possible -- which means you end up with multiple nested templates. And you'll still be amazed at the many ways your Contribute users can fubar things up.

You should download the trial version and try it out yourself. It may be perfect for what your users will be doing. Or it may be a really bad idea.

[vkaryl]

Um. Contribute is 1: NOT user-friendly AT ALL. (I'm no slouch when it comes to new programs; this is one of only two or three programs I've tried in the last five years or so where I HAD TO LOOK AT THE TUTORIAL in order to sort it out....); and 2: SLOW. Even on a T-1 at work.... I can't even IMAGINE what it would be like on dial-up (which is what I have at home - no broadband options other than sat-band and I can't afford it.)

On top of that, while your pages MAY be validated code to begin with, once others start using Contribute to add/delete/modify them, you're going to find that they stop validating in a hurry, and that you have a mish-mash mess of stuff to clean up.

I'd say Contribute is fine if anyone who uses it is a code-freak to begin with and therefore has a solid idea what's going on backgroundish when they're done....

Way too much money for a crippled program IMO (erm. Not that my opinion's worth much....)

[zyquoi]

Contribute isn't FAST - for anyone, learning curve and just general speed of working with it in setup, maintenance is only rated as "fair".

There are two alternatives, one very expensive, RedDot's CMS Express (search for it on their website, it's there) and Metadot (opensource). Metadot isn't too bad, it actually does what it says and it does have a lively support network of enthusiastic users.

I use both (one for work, the other for "home biz") and both have their pros and cons, it depends upon the actual needs the admin and end-user has.

Zyq