Hi,

I have been experimenting with, and reading about Contribute as much as I can
the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately there isn't much in the way of
information about Contribute, and thus my questions have gone largely
unanswered, so I thought I would post on here to try and find some answers, and
also explore some ideas I have...

I am a website designer, and I recently developed a website development
framework in PHP and XML. Essentially the way it works is an object I coded
looks at an xml file which contains meta information about each page in the
site, i.e. the stylesheets, title, meta data, etc. etc. The structure of the
site is based on the directories that files are in, and it is hierarchical.

Each php file only needs to include a header file at the top and footer file
at the bottom and then the framework detects which file it is and loads the
relevant information from the xml file, spitting out the <head>...</head> and
relevant template elements (e.g. menu, header etc.) before the html in the php
file is outputted to the page (normally after something like <div
id="content">) and then the footer include prints out the </div> and the rest
of the template.

Unfortunately, this doesn?t seem to be compatible with Contribute in edit
mode, I am using CS3 Trial version to test...

After my initial confusion, I looked around for answers, hours of searching
and reading and also discussing this with someone who has had some dealings
with Contribute; have cleared in my mind what is going wrong (I think). The
only problem is the problem is semi-intermittent.

By "semi-intermittent" one of two things happens when I click Edit:

a) The stylesheets for the site load however the page is not right, the styles
are all messed up. One a centred fixed-width design with a background image
this doesn?t look pretty, the menu is gone, the header is half chopped off and
isn?t positioned right, there is no white background to the content div and
thus the text is unreadable.
b) The stylesheets don?t load up at all (all there is, is ugly, black, times
new roman text with a white background). This doesn?t both me so much, I mean
it would be nice to have it look like the page will look like since that?s the
premise that Contribute is sold on, and it makes it less confusing for the
clients maintaining the site, but it is usable which is all that matters to me.
The problem however, is that the styles from my stylesheets don?t load up in
the styles drop down menu, even if I choose a specific stylesheet from the
website in the administration settings for that role.

From what I can discern, a) happens when the site is hosted on IIS and b)
occurs when the site is hosted on Apache. Although, I just retested it then and
now its doing b) with IIS so I?m rather confused :P

However, I think I can explain both a) and b). The reason a) happens is it
somehow knows which stylesheets to load, loads them, but doesn?t print out the
template code since its hidden inside the php via a dynamic include e.g.
something like include ?$template/top.inc.php?; And Contribute can?t evaluate
that. Although, the fact the header image showed up kinda blows that one out
the water?

And I believe b) is caused because the stylesheets are printed to the page via
echo statements that Contribute can?t evaluate.

Anyway, I am about 99% sure that nothing can be done to make Contribute simply
work with this setup in its current form, unless anyone has any feedback on
this?

Thus the main point in this post is to put forward my idea / view of what
Contribute should do to handle dynamic webpages better.

I think that it should (either by default, or through some ?mode? within the
program) look at the page, and grab the parts that aren?t dynamic code, then
match this with the generated code that it gets when visiting the page. From
there the edit mode should display the site exactly the same as when you view
it (rather than messing around evaluating server side includes) and just allow
the parts of the page that it matched to the static html to be edited.

I thought this is what it did to start with, which is why I was initially so
confused. Surely it?s the logical way to handle dynamic code?

Thanks

Robert Moore
Website Designer
Perth, Australia