[thelist] The quagmire of CMS - Contribute

Thomas Moore thdomo at gmail.com
Thu May 3 08:32:54 CDT 2007


Christopher,  I'm guessing you just don't get who this product was
intended for. People who don't want to see or deal with html. Thats
why theres no way to view html inside Contribute. You can designate it
to open pages in another program if you want.. However, Contribute is
meant to allow non-technical users update content on static pages.
This is something needed for large companies and govt agencies,
schools, where there is a lot of brochure type info on their sites
they have to maintain.

There is a way to insert snippets. You load them into the a "Library"
directory via Dreamweaver and then users can access them via the
insert menu under "shared assets".

Where the program also shines is when it's used with the Contribute
Publishing Server that allows enterprise admin of users. That means
one login password combo on company networks.

I can use the CPS along with Dreamweaver templates to limit certain
groups of users access to specific directories and also specific
sections on pages, limiting the chance that someone will break
something.

Also the program does a decent job of working between Microsoft
products, and takes out a lot of the MS crap when you cut and paste
from Word.

And really I can't believe anyone would recommend Front Page after I
saw, years ago, what it did to the code.


I get

On 5/2/07, Rikter Support <support at rikter.com> wrote:
> 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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