12/05/2007

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The age-old challenge of managing any website, especially inside the organization, has been updating content. The techies can build the latest and greatest, but if non technical users cannot update content the whole endeavor is moot. Luckily for intranets everywhere, the tools and possibilities have come a long way since I first tackled this problem in the mid-1990s. One such solution is Adobe Contribute CS3.

Using Adobe Dreamweaver as a development tool, the technical side of your shop can set up websites using templates and other fancy features and hand off updates and additional page creation to the subject matter experts. The best part is that through judicious use of the Dreamweaver Templates, you need not worry that the content owners are going to break the overall design and functionality of the site. You simply lock down those parts of the page and code.

Now this all sounds great but if you are anything like me, you say "show me!" In this two part tutorial that is what I intend to do. Part I will cover the administrative basics and Part II will address how the end user (in this case non-technical content creator) can use Contribute to update and add content to existing websites.

For the technical administrator, the workflow looks as follows:

1. Create your website (including templates, etc.)
2. Set up connection and assign roles
3. Monitor or assist end users with making edits in Contribute

Setting up the connection and assigning the roles (step 2) are the key responsibilities of the site administrator. This will lay out what contributors can edit the site and what they can and cannot do in terms of editing and publishing content. Note: From here on I am going to call the site administrators "administrators" and any content editors "contributors" for ease and consistency.

Site Connection

Contribute works by connecting real-time to the actual live website. Consider it a very nice FTP interface that will look and feel to the contributor more like a typical desktop application without all the upload/download and protocol information. Administrators set up a site connection and then provide connection keys to contributors.

To set up a website connection you start by entering all the connection information:

Once you enter this information, Contribute goes through a series of FTP diagnostics where it checks permissions, file structures, etc. Upon successful completion, it will ask you for your name and email address. This information will be used to identify you when you make changes to the site.

You will then receive a summary screen and Contribute will begin to synchronize files between the server and your local copy of Contribute. Once this completes, if you only wanted to use Contribute yourself to update the site, you are ready to go. The home page is displayed and you can start editing right away. For now, let us skip that step as I'll address the ins and outs in Part II of this tutorial.

Once you have the connection set up, you will want to administer the website to set parameters such as rollbacks, roles, and restrictions before you create connection keys for your contributors. To get to the Administer Websites panel, click Edit, Administer Websites:

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