Could Contribute change the way you update your site?

Macromedia launch the HTML editor for the rest of us, and we take a look

— Published January 19th, 2003 | by David Moore

Keeping a site current is a major headache, and a whole industry has grown up around the content management problem. Now Macromedia enters the fray with a cheap and cheerful tool to allow easy site maintenance. So should the content management vendors be worried?

Once a site structure is solid and the templates have been created, most of the physical updating of material is little more than simple word processing, but the tools used to do this have often been overpowered monsters - an enterprise-wide content management solution, or a developer-focused package such as Dreamweaver. It's like using a chainshaw to cut your hair - you can do it, but all that extra power just gets in the way.

Ideally of course, you'd like to delegate minor changes to other people in your organisation, but you're afraid they'll mangle your pages by accident.

Macromedia's [http://www.macromedia.com] new stripped-down HTML page editor, Contribute [http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/], could really help. It allows approved users to browse to the page they want to change, click the Edit button, and work away as if it were a Word document. Then hit Publish, and the site's changed. WYSIWYG never looked so good.

If this sounds a little too easy, administration options allow you to limit the damage an errant editor can do - a powerful Rollback option reverts to earlier versions, compatibility with Dreamweaver templates means only predefined regions of the page can be changed, and there's built-in version control.

Anyone with familiarity with a browser and a word-processer can understand the clean interface, but under the hood the product is based on the industry standard Dreamweaver so it works reliably and won't mess up your code.

It's no use if your site is database-driven or you already have a full-featured content management system in place, but Contribute can definitely improve your job if you're working in flat HTML and putting changes through manually. You can do the day to day updates yourself more easily, or (and this is the real benefit) you can safely delegate the implementation of minor changes to others.

You'll still need something more powerful for design work and major overhauls, and there are no workflow features, but for the introductory price of $99, Contribute could save you from splashing out on a complex content management solution you don't really need. And no, we're not on a commission.

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Could Contribute change the way you update your site?

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