Macromedia created the first version of Contribute in 2003. At that time, the company’s slogan was “Add life to the Web,” and Contribute did so by giving non-technical content editors a way to easily publish to the Web without first learning their <p>’s and <q>’s. This in turn freed trained Web developers to explore the possibilities offered by the ever-evolving Web. The idea was that developers would build their pages in Dreamweaver using templates to indicate specific areas of each page editable by others, while locking down navigation, styles, and other formatting so they’d be safe from unintended changes. Macromedia targeted IT departments as Contribute’s main beneficiaries and customers, soliciting them to purchase and install Contribute for business users and/or designers.
Contribute differs from other programs in this general space, such as Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver extension SiteAssist from WebAssist. FrontPage is for Windows users making their first Web pages, and SiteAssist is a rapid development tool for Web designers who understand the basics but want more sophistication. (See my SiteAssist review for details.)
Blog, Blog, Blog
Contribute 3.0 boasted an impressive list of new features and enhancements: WebDAV support, CSS compliance, built-in image editing tools, and administration features. I had hoped version 4.0, the first release since Adobe and Macromedia merged, would offer a similar range. Instead, it appears that Adobe wants Contribute to become a Swiss Army knife for bloggers.
As a blog editor, Contribute does offer several nifty features: easy connection to the server, a one-stop-shop editor for all of your various blogs, easy categorization, Title and Tags fields, and buttons for Trackback and Allow Comments.
Setup is easy, thanks to a wizard that walks you through the three-step process of entering your credentials for your chosen blog server (Figure 1). (Contribute works with WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger, and supports the MetaWeblog servers from Movable Type and Drupal, among others.)
Figure 1: A wizard hooks you up with your blog server(s).
Once that’s done, the connection window has links to each connected blogs for one-click access. When you’re in, you can edit existing entries by selecting one or add a new entry in Contribute’s WYSIWYG window.
Editing and formatting with Contribute is equally straightforward. With Office-style editing toolbars and icons, creating attractive entries is a pleasant and uncomplicated experience (Figure 2).
Figure 2: This interface makes blogging easy.
Contribute’s drag-and-drop capabilities make quick work of uploading images to your blog. If you enter an image of unnecessarily high resolution, Contribute automatically resizes the image to its preferred specs. Editing images is a double-click away. You can control image size, cropping, alignment, border, padding, and Alt text (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The Image Properties dialog box.
You can also add Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media Player movies (.mov, .mpg/.mpeg, .avi and .wmv), but there’s no easy way to drag and drop music files into your pages.
Windows Wins
Contribute’s interface was modeled after Microsoft Office, and with each generation, Contribute’s integration with–and look and feel of–Office deepens. This makes working with Contribute very easy for anyone who uses Word, Excel, or the myriad products that take interface cues from them.
If you use Windows, Contribute offers three excellent shortcuts to publishing Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook documents directly from those applications. Contribute adds Publish to Web and Post to Blog buttons to Office applications; click these buttons and Contribute opens dialog boxes that let you manage document settings and quickly publish the formatted contents.
Firefox users can install a two-button toolbar with similar integration: Edit in Contribute gives simple access to editing pages that you’re authorized to change, and Post to Blog copies and pastes selected text from Firefox into your connected blog, creating a new page with proper attribution and quote level. My installation of the Firefox toolbar worked fine under Windows, but despite repeated attempts on multiple computers, the Mac installer choked each time I tried to enable the Mac version of Firefox with this toolbar. There is no Safari support for these features.
Contribute for Windows has always been a better product than its Mac counterpart, yet the two are identically priced. It’s maddening that Adobe didn’t address this disparity. And at a time when every Macintosh in stores for the last four months has had “Intel Inside,” Contribute 4.0 is not a Universal Binary application, meaning its code is optimized for older PowerPC-based computers. The feature gap between the Mac and Windows versions seems to be growing, not shrinking.
Speed and Need
Contribute 4.0 performs acceptably on both platforms, though neither feels particularly snappy when it came to loading pages and saving changes. This is primarily because for those tasks, Contribute sends and receives in the foreground, which forces you to wait until those operations complete before moving on. Dreamweaver 8, upon which several of Contribute’s features are based, allows uploading and downloading in the background.
The mission of Contribute has always been to enable non-technical users an easy and safe way to post content to their company site without help from their resident Web guru. With this recent update, Adobe has brought blog editing into the features list. While it may be hip to refer to Contribute as a blogging tool, the features that make it worthy of consideration in any organization–WebDAV support, strong administrative controls, CSS integration, and the wealth of WYSIWYG editing capabilities–have seen very little improvement since version 3.
The price of Contribute 4.0 remains $149 ($79 upgrade). The scarcity of new features other than blogging tools make the upgrade from Contribute 3.0 a tough sell even at a discount.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on November 17, 2006
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