Contribute: Part 2

Administering a Contribute Site

By Zac Van Note

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

A large part of the power of Contribute comes from the ability to administer sites at a very granular level. This means you can allow one user access to modify text only in a specific area of a specific page. You can allow other users to edit any page within a certain folder, and you can allow other users to have much broader access to edit and publish pages across multiple folders or sites. 

All of this power falls under the Administration controls in Contribute. You can access these controls from a link in Dreamweaver’s Site setup dialog box, but you must have a full version of Contribute installed to configure and administer your site and its users. In Part 1, we discussed how to set up a Contribute-friendly site in Dreamweaver. In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to setup the site in Contribute, create users or groups with specific permissions and get users connected to the site.

An upcoming article titled Using Contribute will focus on the specifics of editing existing pages, creating new pages, reviewing and publishing pages. The article will be a good overview for site designers and developers and can be given to site editors for more detailed information on how to get the most out of Contribute.

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Overview

What is the Macromedia Web Publishing System?

Macromedia Web Publishing System (WPS) has been used in the past to describe the collection of software applications and server components Macromedia offers. The company doesn’t seem to be using that moniker anymore, but the software is still there. In addition to Dreamweaver, Contribute, Flash and Fireworks for content creation and editing, the WPS includes Contribute Publishing Server for additional user and document management.

Contribute Publishing Server

Macromedia Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) is software installed on the webserver. CPS provides a method to centrally manage publishing access and a way to track publishing activities. IT Administrators will appreciate CPS for its integration with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers─including Microsoft’s Active Directory. If your organization already uses Active Directory, the time savings can be worth the extra cost. If you don’t already use an LDAP server, you generally won’t bother with this option. For some sites with dozens or hundreds of contributors, there are a number of useful features. Beyond this brief introduction, I won’t be discussing WPS or CPS.

What do I Need to Purchase?

Everyone who will be editing, reviewing or administering pages in Contribute will need to have a full version installed and running on their machine. If you already have Dreamweaver, you still need a copy of Contribute if you are going to administer or edit Contribute pages. If you have several designers on staff, you may choose one or two that will handle Contribute, while the rest stay in Dreamweaver.

Contribute costs $149/user. If you buy 6 at a time, it costs $699. If you purchase larger chunks of licenses the price goes down further. CPS costs $89/user and the license cost decreases depending on the total number of users administered through the system. I would consult with your IT Department (unless you ARE the IT department) and discuss the long-term goals. If you might use LDAP or want to support more than 10 Contribute users, it will likely be worth the extra cost and time to implement CPS.

Site setup in Contribute

A full set of product manuals and documentation is freely available at Macromedia.com: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/contribute. Of course that makes for a lot of dry reading and some of the common pitfalls are not addressed. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the settings available when administering a Contribute site.

Zac Van Note

Zac Van NoteZac earned his BFA in graphic design at New MexicoStateUniversity. In the years before college, he wrote, drew, and published comic books. In the years since college, he's worked as a graphic designer for three large B2B distributors creating catalogs, web sites, and multimedia presentations.

Since 1999, Zac has taught hundreds of classes at the University of New Mexico and Santa FeCommunity College, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, HTML and much more. He has also contributed to several Dreamweaver books as an author and technical editor for New Riders/Peachpit and Thomson-Course Technologies. The site he created for his students, www.creativefuel.org, is a good reference for anyone interested in design and graphics.

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