Intranet Journal
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Adobe Contribute Tutorial, Part I

12/05/2007

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:

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:

This is 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.

If you allow users to add new images, you once again get control of the operation. Besides setting where those images get placed in the file structure, you also get to place limits on the size and dimensions of images. Thank goodness … no longer do you have to deal with massive images that show up on the screen like a mongoloid from the deep.

Rollbacks

Every good document creator and programmer knows the godsend known as rollbacks and multiple revisions. You get to set the number of rollbacks that get kept on the server as your contributors edit. If they totally destroy something this is your chance to get back the last good revision. Keep in mind, though that each time they "save" their work it becomes a revision. So, the trick is finding the right balance between safety (high number of rollbacks) versus storage and complexity (obviously less revisions, less space, fewer files).

Other Settings

The most important user settings I walked through above. You still get to set some other key restrictions however. With "New Pages" you can set the default extension to .htm or .html as you like to maintain consistency across the site. The "Compatibility" settings dictate the level of compatibility between different versions of Contribute allowing for backward compatibility. "Enable PDF Embedding" indicates whether users can embed PDF content or whether it forces users to link to an external PDF document.

"Administration", "Publishing Server", and "Web Server" allow you to alter any of the initial settings you created for the site, configure the process to publish to an intermediary server, and set default pages (index.html, default.html, etc.)

Connection Keys

The connection keys are what make all this work in a distributed publishing environment. You create a connection key for each of your users based on their role and settings, and then send it to them. They simply double-click on the connection key to start up and automatically configure their copy of Contribute.

Once again, go to Edit, Administer Websites and you'll see this screen again. Choose the user/role that you wish to send a connection key to and then click on "Send Connection Key"

Choose whether you are sending the FTP login you already created or are creating a new one.

Choose the role for this connection key:

Then choose whether you will be emailing the connection key or sending it another way. If you are inside your firewall sending via email is most likely secure enough. You also choose a password to give the contributor to access their key. It goes without saying that you don't include the password in the same email as the actual connection key. Treat this as you might any other piece of encrypted data.

The file will be sent via email and then the contributor only needs to click on it to configure Contribute and be up and running.

In Part II of this series I will pick up where I left off here and illustrate the contributor's experience of Contribute.

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