Is It worth Purchasing Contribute?

[deeje]

Hello, Your friendly Mac Contribute engineer here. WE'd really like to track
this down for you. What version of Mac OS X are you using? When Contribute
crashes, does the OS put up a dialog asking you to send information to Apple?
If so, copy the debugging information and post it here, and I can take a look.

[screenname777777777]

There is no message whatsoever. The program just goes away and therefore all
unsaved work is lost.
Mac OS X 10.3.7 667 Mhz PPC G4, 512 mb ram
This happened three times while selecting from the Format table templates
list. I have not since been able to duplicate the exact steps which caused this
to happen. The last time that the program crashed was when attempting to change
the color of a word within a table cell. Again, not reproducible but the
failures have already cost 4 hours of work.

[dpsj]

I have numerous clients set up on Contribute and have found it to be the best
solution available. None of these clients or myself has experined connection
problems and I would highly recommend Contribute 3.0. My clients love it too as
they can now instantly make changes to their content - no more submitting a
request, waiting for it to be uploaded then paying for the changes!

I thought it was important that I post this as anyone reading this thread will
have noticed that a bunch of users jumped in to complain and people are always
very quick to let you know when they are having a negative experience but don't
think to let people know about positive experiences.

Cheers, J

[TaraE]

I wouldn't recommend purchasing the software right now. The support is awful,
and the documentation is even worse! We have had nothing but problems with the
software. I thought that since Dreamweaver was such and great tool that
Contribute 3 would also be wonderful. I went to the Macromedia Max Conference
in New Orleans this year and saw and heard wonderful things about Contribute,
but so far the program will not even connect. We have wasted more time trying
to get Contribute to work, and sitting on hold with tech support then it would
have taken for me just to train the users to use Dreamweaver.

[christina.heikkila]

We've had a great experience using Contribute on our campus. We've set up
Dreamweaver templates with editable regions (actually just one big region), so
that all pages get our standard navigation and identity. I set up roles for
different groups (student services, bookstore, English dept) that want to
maintain their own pages, and send them connection keys. Each role can be set
up with access only to the folders they are allowed to work in. The users
require absolutely zero training to get started. In fact I offered a training
session once last semester, and it took only 20 minutes to go through
everything. And half of that was teaching them about web accessibility and
going over our site guidelines!

The only issue I've seen is that Contribute has trouble with very long or
complex pages - click, wait a minute, type, wait a minute, etc.

Our users love it, and I love the control I have over the overall site. We
had been giving the users direct FTP access, and although one or two users knew
HTML, the majority just created their web pages in MS Word and did a 'save as
HTML', then FTPd that to the site. Not pretty, let me tell you. We also have
a few that were using FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Those pages all had different
styles - we couldn't enforce a consistent look/feel to the site. Those users
who have tried both Dreamweaver and Contribute are amazed at how much easier
Contribute is. Even those users who used to create pages in Word are happy,
since they don't have to worry about the FTP part.

Christina

[J Long]

I have to agree with Christina. We've been using Contribute 2 with about 20
editors without problems. The only significant issue that I can recall is that
when initially training users, they had difficulty maintaining a connection.
The problem was immediately resolved when we upped the number of concurrent
users on the FTP server. I haven't seen any documentation on this, but we had
to up it significantly more than the actual number of users. We haven't
switched to Contribute 3 yet because of issues on our network with the
FlashPaper component of that version. Apparently there are conflicts either in
Windows 2000 or Office 2000. We are experimenting with Contribute 3 with FP
uninstalled and it seems fine. We plan to switch all users to CT3 after
upgrading operating system this summer. We are currently redesigning our
intranet to utilize capabilities of CT. I'm especially excited by this upgrade
and the improved capability to handle CSS. I've got the same observations as
Christina as far as the effectiveness. We spent 4-5 hours training users, but
most of that time was teaching details of the site's style guide. It's such a
dramatic improvement in maintaining consistency of site.

[screenname777777777]

managed to create an intial page without additional incident but now i'm stuck.
When I hit the 'new page' button, (online or offline), i get the templates
dialog. I choose Logding2 Home template and then get the error:
Contribute cannot create the page due to Unknown Error.

[trx430ex]

I have to ask the 'Pro' users towards purchase, were the successful sites
developed from scratch? Or were they developed from and added onto from older
sites built in Dream weaver? I can see new deployments working fine with
slight glitches, but older sites reaching back through time could develop bugs
of un-godly proportions. My site is from 2001 starting in Dream weaver 3
Studio, then Ultra-Dev studio, then upgraded to MX studio. If the new
deployments are working with minimal glitches, then I could start with a fresh
domain, deploy, and just use Contribute in the sub site, then do all the
linking in my MX rig to the main site. Not letting Contribute touch the
original site, as god knows there is a dam rat?s nest of networking going on
all the way from the beginning in 2001. I don't blame Macromedia one bit for
not supporting the free gig, some of the support requests I get make me want to
jump out the window, to the ADD public, read the directions, go through the
sample, talk to your host, make sure your rig is in good shape, look at the
entire help file,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, then if you have a question, ask.

[Jefferis NoSpamme]

I am only testing Contribute 3, but I see no way of using it as a from
scratch development tool. It needs to have elements to plug into holes and
slots, like graphics. It would be rather clunky to use for blank pages.

Jeff


On 2/23/05 1:36 AM, in article cvh88g$29a$1@forums.macromedia.com,
"trx430ex" <admin@paatving.com> wrote:

> I have to ask the 'Pro' users towards purchase, were the successful sites
> developed from scratch? Or were they developed from and added onto from older
> sites built in Dream weaver? I can see new deployments working fine with
> slight glitches, but older sites reaching back through time could develop bugs
> of un-godly proportions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jefferis Peterson, Pres.
Web Design and Marketing
[url]http://www.PetersonSales.com[/url]

[christina.heikkila]

In response to trx430ex, our site was a mess when we started using Contribute.
The site had existed for several years, with many different authors FTP-ing
pages up, and we had about 2000 pages. We had pages created by Dreamweaver,
FrontPage, MS Word saved as HTML, hand-coded pages, you name it. Contribute
was able to edit all of those pages - just once or twice we ran into a problem
with missing table tags that made the page look blank when you tried to edit it
in Contribute.

Once we started moving our authors onto Contribute, we realized that we had an
opportunity to really do some cleaning up. We created a main site template in
Dreamweaver and applied it to all the pages (yes manually - it took a while to
do almost 2000 pages, and we 'froze' development on the site by disabling FTP
connections while we were doing that). The template is just a 'skeleton'
that brings in 3 SSI (server-side include) files - that is where the real meat
of our site navigation and style is. There is one editable region in the
middle of this Dreamweaver template. Our Contribute users are restricted by
role to only be able to edit in their own folders, and can only create new
pages from the template. When they edit a page, all our navigation and so on
is outside of the editable region, so they can't mess that up. The cool thing
is that with the SSIs, all we have to do to change the look of our site is to
just change it in the SSI file - and presto, all the pages on the site have the
new look.

[cahcott61]

Hi,
just to update you on the problems I was having. A support person from
Macromedia contacted me early last week and managed to resolve my difficulty.
I have been able to edit and publish every time I tried since then. I still
don't know what the problem was. As part of the process, I gave them all my
connection details. They tested the connection and found no problems. They
then sent me a new connection key and, with that, it works fine. I have asked
what the connection key did but they have not replied. So my guess is that
some of the connection problems are related to the connection setup.
Hope this helps someone

[image_gallery]

-------
Feb 28, 2005

Can a hand coder (HTML/XHTML/CSS) simply hand code the "editable here" and
"not editable here" instructions into an HTML document, thereby allowing a
Contribute 3 user to edit their entire website without "breaking" the layout?

Ambassador
-------

[christina.heikkila]

Yes, you sure can - I do that all the time, I'm a hand-coder too.

[IanW]

Christina, have followed this thread and noticed that the decription of your
old site maintenance is very much like ours. We are evaluating Contribute 3 and
are having some sucesses particularly with user experience (which is key for
us). I have a question: how are you handling navigation for added/moved/deleted
pages? Do you hand code new links - if so who does it (user or administrator).
Or do you do it programatically (e.g. via CPS, Coldfusion, etc.) I would be
interested to know as our site is 5,000+ pages. Thanks for any advice you can
give. Regards Ian

[christina.heikkila]

Hi Ian,

Like I mentioned above, we use SSI files which contain all our site navigation
elements - we have links across the top, down the left side, and along the
bottom of every page on the site, and all of that is contained within these SSI
files. So when one of those pages is moved, we can update the nav structure
simply by editing the affected SSI file. Bam, the whole site is updated at
once. (That was the biggest hurdle, but with the biggest payoff - you gotta get
these includes in place on every page. It hurts, but it's a one-time job.
Then you have to restrict your users to using Contribute, which keeps them
within the templates and won't let them mess up the includes.)

To prevent link rot, I will also do two things when a page is deleted or moved
-
(1) I use 'linklint', a link checker program (free download:
[url]http://www.linklint.org/[/url]) to check to see which of our other pages link to this
page. I can then fix the links on those pages manually.
(2) To catch links to the page from offsite, I edit the site configuration
file (httpd.conf since we're running Apache) and put in a redirect to the new
page, so anyone who requests the old page doesn't get a 404 but instead is
seamlessly redirected to the new page.

[jjs]

"christina.heikkila" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:d052pv$hfk$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> Hi Ian,
>
> Like I mentioned above, we use SSI files which contain all our site
> navigation
> elements - we have links across the top, [... snip good article ...]

Whew! Good work. Are you looking for a new job? :)

[Phillio]

I'm a hand coder, too and am looking all around this site for how you hand code
pages to be used with Contribute. Any examples? Is it easy? Just not feeling
very confident now, and would like a sample of Dreamweaver-free development.
Contribute would be a great CMS solution for several clients - I just don't
want to be stuck using Dreamweaver (which I actually like) when I want to code
by hand.

Thanks,

Phil

[Alan]

What is it you are wondering?
how to hand code Dw template syntax to control "editable areas" ?

You'd just insert the html comments. (following some basic structure
conventions so Contribute/Dw "sees" them as valid template pages, such as
not enclosing </head> or <body> inside of an editable region, not nesting
editable regions, and so on)

or ?

[Phillio]

Thanks, that's mostly it.

Is there documentation for the template/comment structure somewhere? Is it
included with Contribute?

I'm assuming it's the "editable region" comments. Can you also control it on a
"div" by "div" basis?

Thanks!

Phil

[Alan]

Do you have Dreamweaver?

suggest you try the 30 day download, if for nothing else then to see the
template comment structure-

you can find a fair amount of into here in the tutorial section-
[url]http://www.dreamweavermx-templates.com[/url]
Look in the ones on converting older templates to MX template syntax.

You should make both the "child" files AND the template.dwt files, and
upload the .dwt files to the remote site into a Templates folder at the root
level.

I wouldn't hand code this, i'd use dreamweaver. Without dreamweaver you will
need a cheatsheet or snippets file of comments, and knowledge of the "ins
and outs" of something you don't use. That's not to say it can't be done.