12/05/2007

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The first choice you'll need to make is the user interface. Do you want Contribute users to experience a Dreamweaver style editing environment or a standard word processing environment? In most cases you want them to have as basic a setup as possible, so choose Standard word processing. That is what I will choose for this and the next tutorial.

In this case you want to say "Yes" and become the website's Contribute Administrator so you can create the other settings. Once you choose yes, you will see the following screen:

These are the master controls for your Contribute website.

Users and Roles

Do you want your contributors to be able to both edit and publish their changes? Or, do you want to have their changes approved by someone else before going live? What folders or files do you want different users to have access to? Perhaps you want to limit by department or functional role so the Marketing Department contributors don't try to get Dilbertonian revenge on the Technical Department's website. This is also where you can set restrictions on elements like forms, images, CSS styles, and how/if new pages get created.

Contribute offers two default roles Writer and Publisher. They are fairly self-explanatory in that writers can only edit but not publish live to the website and publishers can. You can use these existing roles and any defaults, change the role defaults, and/or create new custom roles based on your company's needs (again considering a by department or by function scenario). For simplicity sake I am going to keep the defaults but walk through an example of the settings for the Publisher role to give you a sense of the level of control you can have as an administrator.

You can limit a role based on folder and file access. You can also specify whether or not users can delete any files.

Editing preferences are many and allow you to set parameters around what will happen within the code when users make their changes. Anyone who has worked with HTML and a WYSIWYG editor knows that no matter how advanced the tools get what goes on behind the scenes may or may not be what you want to see happen.

The Styles and Fonts and New Pages options are where you get to determine how much or how little flexibility contributors will have to change a given site's design elements. The Styles and Fonts settings will address how the CSS behind a site is exposed, hidden, or altered when contributors do their work.

New pages settings will dictate whether you force contributors into using existing templates or allow them to alter or add pages on their own. You can set multiple templates within your Contribute site which can be handy as you assign roles to different groups whose sites may adopt the overall Company design standards but with their own unique design flair.

File placement is an administrator's dream. Remember the days of contributors creating images and files and making nothing but a total file management mess? Well, now you get to force them into your file and folder structure. You get to set the defaults of where images, PDF, Microsoft, and other files go. The sky is the limit with setting these defaults. You can also set a file size parameter. Gone are the days of contributors attempting to link to a 500 MB presentation.

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