Maintaining Database Content with PHP, Contribute 3, and Dreamweaver MX 2004

Macromedia Contribute 3 along with Contribute Publishing Services (CPS) are starting to prove to be a very useful pair of applications. The Contribute workflow is simple: You browse to the web page you want to edit, edit the web page, and then publish it. CPS compliments your workflow with some features that you would expect to only find with a content management system – user management, logging of changes, etc. But one of its limitations is with web sites that have content in a database.

In this article, I will go over the theory behind an application I, along with three other co-op students since the fall—Anton Polski, Lori Superina, and Areeb Shams—developed to facilitate a publication process in publishing to a database. It also allow to manage the content by checking it out of the database, creating a static version, and dropping the static version into a ‘static’ directory so you can edit it with Contribute.

Written by Jesse Rodgers.