Any college web developers here using Contribute?

[RonMA68]

Hi all,

I was wondering if there are any college web developers here that are using
Contribute? If so, can you share some pros and cons of going with Contribute?

We are trying to make a decision here at Assumption College. We have about 40
users (dept webmasters).

We are soon going to redesign our site and roll in all of the following
features: ADA Compliancy, Web Standards, CMS, SEO, and RSS.

Any insight that you can give would be greatly appreciated!!

Best,
Ron

[mzanime.com]

Well, Contribute isn't going to help you in any aspects in regards of: ADA
Compliancy, Web Standards, CMS, SEO, or RSS.

These features will have to be implemented and coded on your own. Contribute
would only allow those webmasters to add in content, and apply styles from your
style sheet. If you've got templates setup, users can post content without
messing up your layout and color scheme, or things of that nature.

It sounds to me like it might be a good idea for you to try it out. Contribute
won't allow users to edit any HTML or modify the code used in scripts though.
This kind of stuff must be done from outside Contribute.

[ID_Geek]

Contribute only helps faculty who are not HTML savvy to make changes to their
website without depending on the webmaster for minor changes.

Contribute doesn't account for compliancy of web standards. That is the
responsibility of the developer. I hope this helps

[PerfectShot]

I just got into Contribute and I think its great.
Tomorrow I'll give workshops for department "webmasters'.

Pros - super easy to use, users can't break anything and did I mention easy to
use?
Cons - not free, works best if you redo the site with templates, doesn't work
too well with includes

I'd say, go for it...

Make sure that if you add all the other feature you mentioned, to properly set
editable regions and modify pages so that they work well with Contribute...
(That can take a bit of time).
And the templates should directly link to your stylesheets. The college's site
I work on had includes (two levels of them) to pull them in... Not good for C3.

Good luck!

[PerfectShot]

Oh, and you might do some research whether you need the publishing services...

The product was ordered and I have little use for it (never installed it).

I just have one FTP account for all users and make sure that they only have
access to the files they need to update...

I didn't want to get too deeply involved with the Mac OS X / Unix permissions.
We got a Mac Webserver... I'm really starting to like this program...

It beats the little PHP program a webmaster from my previous college wrote.
Contribute rulz.

;-)

[getzapped]

Just fyi from stumblings:

You may want to check out the Contribute case study for Rochester Medical
Center:

[url]http://macromedia.com/resources/education/hed/campaign/teach_tech/casestudy.html[/url]

Also, consider contacting someone at Deltacollege.edu, Virgina.edu's college
of Arts&Sciences or ND.edu, as they are using Contribute (check source code) to
manage site, to get their take on pros/cons.

[christina.heikkila]

We use Contribute at Cape Fear Community College. We've (currently - keeps
growing) got about 30 folks from all different departments using it, and
everyone loves it. These are instructors, department secretaries, and other
staff, who are maintaining their own pages as a small part of their job, and
therefore don't have the time to put into learning and relearning complex
software (Dreamweaver) once or twice a semester when they need to update
something. They just fire up Contribute and they're good to go.

We use server-side includes, and have no problem with Contribute. The SSIs
are in the non-editable region of our templates, so they aren't editable inside
Contribute and aren't meant to be.

As far as accessibility, you can set Contribute so that any image is required
to have alt text, but that's about all the help you're going to get from the
software. I cover accessibility in my training sessions.

As the administrator, I'm happy they're using Contribute because I don't have
the 'forgot my ftp password' problem anymore, and I can set all kinds of
permissions for my users and update them on the fly without the users having to
do anything (eg revoke or grant access to a folder).

But if you're going to use a CMS, I wouldn't think you'd need Contribute -
they generally have their own editing interface and user permissions built in.