[thelist] The quagmire of CMS - Contribute

Rikter Support support at rikter.com
Wed May 2 20:58:15 CDT 2007


Contribute is a nightmare---worst product I've seen in years from
Macromodobe.  It fails to  use CSS properly.  It also fails to allow any
method to insert HTML snippets easily or access the HTML.  I'd rather have
my clients use a copy of FrontPage---and have taught them to use that editor
(more like MS Word which they are familiar with) to make basic edits.
Really.  That's how bad Contribute is.  Version 2 to 3 was just a number
change only.  No real difference.

And it's terribly slow.  Avoid this product.

Christopher

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Bob Meetin
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 10:55 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] The quagmire of CMS - Contribute

I've been avoiding Contribute for years. It's been lurking/looming in 
the background, however with one of my new clients I now have to come to 
grips with it.  I used dreamweaver some a couple years back, but now I 
no longer use it for design/development, just as an FTP tool.

Current situation - I have to set up a site such that the client can 
update it through Contribute.  I rather expected some problem, but 
really it totally breaks up in contribute, similar in dreamweaver.  I 
made sure that the stylesheets, etc are referenced correctly, but 
suspect that it is simply a problem with perhaps floats/columns or other 
not rendering correctly with a tableless design.  I'm shooting in the 
dark here.

I can convert to tables and undoubtedly make it work.  With Contribute 
being the requirement, does anyone have alternative suggestions?  Is 
Contribute designed to work on CSS/tableless layouts but perhaps 
something skewed in the design?

They don't want an alternative solution such as updating sections with 
PHP forms.  There is no database.

-Bob

Ben Glassman wrote:
> Up until recently the company I work for was using Contribute as a
solution
> for clients to edit their static web pages. We recently made the switch to
a
> full CMS (we are using a modified version of MODx[1], which I highly
> recommend).
>
> Contribute was fine if you want to have the user simply edit the content
> area of pages using a WYSIWYG application with an integrated FTP client.
> However, it has limitations in terms of adding navigation, as others have
> mentioned.
>
> My primary complaint against Contribute was that it was another browser
that
> you had to support, and one with very little in the way of documentation
for
> CSS rendering issues. Therefore it could be time consuming to get pages to
> render correctly. Pages would also render correctly in browsing mode, but
> once Contribute switched to Edit mode they would break, sometimes in ways
> that made the content invisible (and hence unable to be edited). It also
> (perhaps they have fixed this now) does not parse PHP/ASP includes (but
> seemed to work with SSI), which meant that I had to structure my code
> differently, leaving the main divs in each page rather than in the
include,
> or the framework would always break in edit mode.
>
> In my eyes, Contribute is a simplfied version of a program like
Dreamweaver
> which is fine for small static sites but if you are building larger sites
> with more dynamic content (calendars, photo galleries, databases, forums,
> etc.) a full featured CMS can be much more flexible.
>
> Ben
>
> [1] http://www.modxcms.com
>   


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