Macromedia Contribute 3

Easy Content Management, but Lacks Robust Tools

By Kevin M. Kilbride

March 1, 2005    Source: Studio Monthly

Contribute is Macromedia’s attempt to streamline the workflow of professional Webmasters by pushing at least part of the HTML data entry process into the hands of content managers, researchers, developers, engineers and marketing specialists—the very people who are typically the source of information that finds its way into an organization’s Web sites. Contribute lets these folks use a simple "browse-edit-submit" paradigm to manage documents for which they have been assigned responsibility. Submissions can be either sent directly back to the production server, or to a reviewer within the Contribute system using the integrated document flow feature.

As an HTML document editor, Contribute is actually quite anemic, offering only rudimentary text and image formatting options. Although it allows users to define "styles" of a sort, the attributes of these styles do not provide even basic CSS-1 coverage; instead, users are limited to simple font, quadding (left, center, right, justified) and color selections. There are no facilities for form design; object positioning or any other "advanced" formatting features in Contribute. Dreamweaver, if installed, may be launched from within Contribute to handle sophisticated page editing jobs, but it is clear that Macromedia developed Contribute to be used primarily by people who do not need to precisely control the formatting of their documents themselves.

Contribute is as a terrific information-collection organ, to be deployed by competent Web designers and an organization’s IS department. Professional designers are expected to initiate the process by creating a framework site, essentially defining an overall "look and feel." They might also create a set of Dreamweaver template pages to provide end-users with pre-formatted containers in which to dump new content. Contribute preserves any existing style information in pages being edited, despite the fact that it is unable to generate all but the simplest styles itself.

Both the framework site and its template pages can be designed to restrict modifications by end-users to specific fields, thus maintaining global style policies by preventing common page elements from being changed. The system administrator can assign specific editing and submission rights to users, with the privileged information residing either on the Web server itself, or in a corporate directory service. Both LDAP and Microsoft’s Active Directory are supported.

Although user privileges can be stored securely, all other system metadata—including temporary documents in the Contribute document flow system—must reside in a specially named folder at the root of the actual Web hierarchy. I don’t understand this decision. System security and robustness could have been enhanced by permitting metadata to be stored outside the publicly servable document hierarchy, with address links in the metadata pointing back to the production server.