What do you think about Macromedia Contribute?

January 17, 2003 by Walter Strong

Some clients NEED to have access to their pages so a good designer is going to make editable areas available to them, and template pages to meet their needs. Other parts of the site will be too complex and need to be restricted. The cost per user is not significant when the client feels that they have gained access to portions of the site they deem to be important...either from an interest in their clients and site visitors or from a need to satisfy their own ego-related issues.

This is a relatively modest tool and, if Macromedia is smart, it will become increasingly functional while preserving the more complicated parts of the pages from damage due to civilian cockpit error.

January 17, 2003 by Todd Prouty

I agree with Walter's review, but must say that this poll is not very effective as a guage of opinions on Contribute. All options but one are negative, and "Fantastic product!" is overwhelmingly positive. A couple middle-ground options would be nice in cases such as mine, where the jury is still out. Some of my sites are probably too dynamic, but some smaller clients may have a need for a product like this.

March 9, 2003 by Athos Toxo_Q

I'm busy for 3 days now to figure out how my client could work with Contribute.

The tutorials is really bad. What does *.html.LCK? mean, where are my templatesfolder? Why is is loading just a part of the images? Why does it take such a long time before there is a connection with my server? etc. 

Let Macromedia work it out first, now Contribute is a pain in the ass.

 

March 26, 2003 by Tim Burke

I don't know much about the product yet, but from what I've seen, you have to buy into the Macromedia method of having a page template, where you lock down everything except the area in the page you want them to edit.  This may work for simple designs and layouts, but I don't have that many simple designs and layouts.  Also, I don't use Macromedia's products exactly the way they would like me to.  I never use a page template, and I'm not interested in doing it now.  I use ASP to build an administrative backend which allows them to update the copy on particular pages.  They never touch my actual pages, or open an HTML editor. 

TB