Contribute CS3 Makes Easy CMS Even Easier

If you want an easy yet effective CMS solution right off the shelf, Contribute is a good selection—and the CS3 upgrade offers a few new vital features.

Contribute is what I use when my clients need some kind of content management system (CMS) without hiring a web programmer or spending a thousand bucks. Since I design websites with Dreamweaver, the integration with Contribute is seamless and it’s easy to specify what is editable by the client and what remains editable only by me. I was curious to review Contribute CS3 because Contribute in general gets very little press but Adobe certainly feels it’s an important part of their product lineup. Contribute was one of the Macromedia products recently brought into Adobe’s product portfolio due to last year’s Adobe-Macromedia merger, and it’s a second-tier product so I expected it to get less attention and less new features with the CS3 upgrade. I think that’s true: Contribute CS3 is not a quantum leap forward from its predecessor, Contribute 3. However, the application runs well and the new features it does have are exciting ones.

FLASH VIDEO

This is easily the most exciting new feature of Contribute CS3: you can now add Adobe Flash Video (FLV) to webpages by dragging-and-dropping the video to your page or using the Insert –> Flash menu (see Figure 1). Contribute CS3 will upload the video file and put it on the page at the appropriate place. I’ve tried this feature and it works as it should, which is all I can ask for. During the CS3 demonstrations and briefings, Adobe made it very clear that they consider it their mission to deliver content creation products not just to creative professionals (designers, video producers, etc.) but anyone creating materials, including teenagers with camcorders. It’s these budding YouTubers who benefit most from Contribute and its new Flash Video features.

Figure 1: The Insert –> Flash dialog box in Contribute CS3.

PUBLISH FROM OFFICE TO THE WEB

Ironically, the next “wow” feature is one that allows you to never launch Contribute CS3 again. If your clients or content creators use Microsoft Office to create their content, Contribute CS3 adds a Contribute menu item and buttons that allow content to be opened in Contribute CS3, published to a website or posted to a blog. It takes some forethought and work ahead of time, but you can plan it so the addition of content from Office applications to a website or blog is seamless. I would love to be able to report just how seamless this is, but there’s a problem: the feature is WINDOWS ONLY. I think this compatibility issue is unacceptable: we’ve spent fifteen years moving away from IBM-compatible floppy disks and OS-specific applications, and Adobe has done a great job of engineering its applications to run the same on all major systems. That’s what makes this all the more disappointing—for Mac users, anyway. I suppose the thinking is that most users writing and creating content will be the regular guys on regular PCs….

ONE FOR TWO

The other cross-application feature is browser-based editing buttons, and in this case Contribute CS3 works as well for Macs as it does for Windows. You’ll have to ensure you are using one of the supported browsers:

• Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and 6.0 on Windows 2000 (SP 4) and Windows XP (SP 2)
• Mozilla Firefox versions 1.5 and 2.0 on Windows 2000 (SP 4) and Windows XP (SP 2)
• Mozilla Firefox versions 1.5 and 2.0 on Mac OS X® (10.3.9) and Mac OS X (10.4.x)

As with the Office menu and toolbar, everything is installed automatically for your browser when you install Contribute CS3. Your browser will get a new toolbar with the “Edit in Contribute” and “Post to Blog” buttons; if you are visiting one of your website currently managed with Contribute CS3, clicking one of the buttons will take you right into Contribute CS3, ready to edit. It’s a fairly helpful feature though it’s not paradigm-changing, but I like how the Contribute team is thinking about its users and how they are doing their daily work: us creative pros are using Photoshop, InDesign and other creative apps constantly, but journalists, writers and other content creators are using Microsoft Office apps and browsers more than anything else. It’s these people who Contribute is designed for.

PDF, ANYONE?

One of the requests I get the most from coworkers is, “Can you make this into a PDF for me?” Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, JPEGs, whatever—”Can you make this into a PDF for me?” I get tired of it, actually. Contribute CS3 has some new tools so you can link or embed PDF files into webpages or blog entries and convert Microsoft Office documents into PDF. This is another great insight into just how writers, salespeople and other non-designers operate—they want PDF files all the time, but never have the tools to do so (or they don’t know how to use them). Now, they have one more option in Contribute CS3. Once again, the Office document to PDF conversion feature is a Windows-only thing—another disappointment, though relatively minor because Mac OS X users have enjoyed native PDF creation tools for years now.

As for the PDF linking and embedding features, they work very well and make it easy to add PDF content to your webpages. Just use Insert –> PDF (you’ll find many important functions in the Insert menu) and you’ll be given the opportunity to specify the PDF’s location and how you want to use it. You can either link to a PDF or embed it, making its content visible right away as another object on the page. The PDF content will be made EOLAS-compliant by Contribute CS3, which I understand means that the multimedia should be accessible across all major browsers. I tried this with a few PDFs and it worked out great—embedding a PDF is very easy with Contribute—though my document had a size of 8.5″ x 11″, making it very large on the webpage. Here’s a tip: double-click the PDF on the page to access the PDF Properties dialog box, where you can resize your PDF. If I know the average Contribute user, however, this will not be enough: “Can I embed the PDF and link to the file at the same time?” “Can I embed a multi-page PDF and have all pages show up? Or just the odd pages? Or just page 2?” That is when a designer with Dreamweaver is needed.

CAN BLOGGING GET ANY EASIER?

Since blogging has become so ubiquitous, blogging tools online have become cheap and easy to use. Contribute CS3 joins the competition with WYSIWYG blog templates that make it more convenient to write blog entries. Contribute’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface and robust text-editing engine makes it easy to work with, though Blogger and WordPress are easy to use also. Contribute CS3 beats these and many other blogging solutions when it comes to using rich media (drag-and-drop is about as easy as it gets) and the fact that it works with whatever HTML templates your designer can create for you. That gives you greater control over your blog, though it also means there’s more work up front to design templates and set it up within Contribute. If you want a unique blog and need to control just how it appears, you can’t go wrong with a Dreamweaver-Contribute combination. If you don’t really care what your blog looks like, then those other blogging solutions will have a lot to offer.

CONCLUSION

Contribute CS3 really does not have that many new features going for it—not like Photoshop CS3 Extended or Flash CS3 Professional. In terms of the amount of improvement over its previous version, Contribute CS3 is probably on par with Fireworks CS3, which did not impress me a whole lot—I feel Fireworks’s web graphics niche has been taken over by Photoshop CS3 and its ImageReady tools, and it’s searching for its next reason for being. Contribute CS3, on the other hand, still has a clearly defined niche and has improved itself with a few new features that speak to the users who need Contribute the most—those who need to work with websites but can’t design them. The amount of media and content they can now include has been expanded (Flash Video, PDF) and tools are now available to work with websites from Microsoft Office and major web browsers, a big bonus for these same users. That’s why I rank the Contribute upgrade higher than the Fireworks upgrade.

Adobe Contribute CS3
Adobe Systems
$149/$79 upgrade
Available in CS3 Web Standard and CS3 Web Premium suites, and sold separately