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.