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Earlier this week, Macromedia released an update to its Web Publishing system, which includes incremental updates to Contribute (version 3.1) and the Contribute Publishing Services (version 1.1). It's a free download for users of the current version and includes several minor improvements that should make managing a large site or group of sites easier.

Contribute is Macromedia's three-year-old Web publishing tool that aims to make updating an intranet or Internet site as easy as editing an Office document. According to a Macromedia representative, Contribute has seen wide adoption since its first release and is the fastest growing product in Macromedia history.

The Web Publishing System, which debuted in August 2004 along with the enterprise-ready Contribute 3, now has more than 250 enterprise clients comprising more than 360,000 users. Macromedia sees Contribute's growth as part of a trend that includes the rise of blogs and wikis: all are tools that make contributing to the online world easier. Even users who are allergic to anything the slightest bit technical can manage to use Contribute.

The update to the Contribute Publishing System includes support for RSS feeds, making it easier to monitor changes to your site. Previously, you'd have to check pages one by one to see if they had new information. With RSS support, you can use any RSS aggregator to keep track of pages so that you'll know at once if changes are posted. This should be a real timesaver for managers who need to keep track of a variety of extranets updated by outside partners.

The Publishing System already had LDAP support, but now the interface is easier, and it works seamlessly with different LDAP configurations. Since remote offices might install different LDAP configs, a central system needs to be able to work with them all. Additionally, a Contribute administrator can now override a file check out, canceling the check out if the file is urgently needed.

Posting changed pages to your staging server and then making them live can be a hassle, which is why the Contribute Publishing System can now take over the job. You can move files back and forth easily from the same interface you use for other management tasks.

The upgraded Contribute now includes the ability to work better with Microsoft Office documents and work with shared folders on the Web, so that you can share resources in a convenient online folder with remote workers. Posting non-HTML resources to your site is now easier, as well, as Macromedia has removed several steps from the uploading process.

Contribute's new ability for managing nested sites is getting a lot of attention. Now, a nested site can have different administrative rights from the sites above it, so a manager can assign a nested site to an employee, while still keeping an overall control of the site.

If your company uses Macromedia's Breeze Web conferencing tool, you'll appreciate that Contribute now works much more easily with it, letting you pull Breeze content into a Web page in one step.

With this latest update, Contribute can now pull content directly from Macromedia Breeze.