12/13/2007

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Now that you have set up your website for use with Contribute as an administrator in Part I of this tutorial, it is time to get your end user (contributor) up to speed with how to update the website and the publishing workflow.

Once you send your contributor their connection key, all they need to do is double-click on it to configure Contribute. That will start the Import Connection Key wizard.

The contributor must enter the connection key password you set up for them as administrator when you created the key. Assuming you included the FTP username and password within the encrypted key, once the contributor hits OK they are all set to begin editing.

Note: For the purpose of this example, I am going to use a role of "Writer" where I can edit and create but not publish pages. This will allow me to touch on the draft, review, and publish process more distinctly. If you can edit and publish, the steps are reduced and you can have changes appear live almost instantly.

All editing and page creation is done within Contribute using a familiar browser and word processing like interface. To begin editing, browse to the site you are editing as a contributor by entering the URL in the address bar. Once the site displays simply hit the "Connect" button to start editing existing content or creating new pages.

This will give you access to the "Edit" and "New Page" buttons which means you can actively start editing the site.

To create a new page, click on the "New" key on the top toolbar.

This will give you the "New Web Page or Blog Entry" screen from which you can select your new page's starting format. In most cases you are going to want contributors on your Intranet to work from templates your web team has already created. On my site you can see one template listed which is then shown in the Preview pane.

Once you choose your template, you can then enter a Page Title (this will become the filename by default) before hitting the OK key to proceed. You then have a blank template from which to create your page. The nice thing is that as a contributor you can only edit portions of the site that have been defined as editable regions so you cannot "break" the overall design and operation of the site.

For this example I am going to create a sample page that contains links to worthwhile online resources. As you can see, I can only edit the sections called "Header" and "Body".

To enter text, all I do is simply type it in and it will automatically take on the formatting properties defined by the existing external CSS stylesheet(s) in use on the site, if any. However, I can add additional formatting using the toolbar at the top of Contribute or the Format menu. As you can see, the usual suspects of formatting options are available.

I've added some lists and bolding with just several clicks using an interface similar to any word processing program.

To add links, simply highlight the text you wish to hyperlink and hit the "Link" button on the top of the editing screen. Choose one of the options from the menu.

In this case I chose Browse to a Web Page so I could grab the URL. What's nice about the resulting screen is a contributor doesn't need to know the URL (or even know what a URL is) to make links happen. They can use a browser to find it, navigate to a file on your company's file server, or link to a recent page they edited. It goes without saying that it will take some education to ensure people don't link to files on their My Computer only to find that once it is published to the Intranet they become dead links. Or, if they do that they are also published to the website.

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