REVIEW: Contribute CS4

I like Contribute—since its introduction in 2002 it’s always been a cheap and reliable application that enables content editors to push their material to websites without any programming or coding skills. It’s been my go-to choice for the content management of small websites that can’t justify the cost and complexity of an online content management system (CMS). Contribute has been upgraded to CS4 with the rest of Adobe’s web applications, but CMSes are getting cheaper and cheaper, and more and more users are becoming adept at HTML, so for the first time I wonder if Contribute’s days are numbered. After looking through Contribute CS4’s new features, I don’t see how it will retain its niche.

Workflow integration

Contribute CS4 has been designed with web creators, administrators and content contributors in mind, same as every version of Contribute that preceded it. The most important improvement involves workflow: administrators can now specify a workflow routine so authors or reviewers cannot publish without the proper approvals. Four workflows are possible:

• Author > Publish
• Author > Review > Publish
• Author > Approval > Publish
• Author > Review > Approval > Publish

Contribute CS4 is smart enough to hide and reveal tools dynamically depending on the workflow and the user, and it’s practically foolproof. Workflows can be created and edited by administrators for complete control. It works well, and I’m surprised this hasn’t been incorporated in Contribute until now. If you were wary of Contribute due to lax workflow restrictions, look into Contribute CS4 because workflow can be as strict as you need.

In-Browser Editing

It’s a cool feature: you can edit pages with Contribute controls right in your web browser! It is very slick and with it you don’t necessarily need to work with pages in Contribute in order to edit pages with Contribute. However, there are a few requirements and general issues:

• You can’t work with a webpage with just the web browser: the user has to connect to the website with Contribute (the application) and only then has the option to use his/her web browser controls. By the way, what shows up in the web browser is the In-Browser Editor (IBE) and it is only designed to edit—you can’t create pages.
• The In-Browser Editor works on only a few browsers, though they are important ones. If you work with Windows Vista or XP, Firefox 2 or later and Internet Explorer 6 or 7 will work. If you are using a Mac, only Firefox 2 or later will work. I’m surprised by this because Safari is a major browser for the Macintosh community, but it’s true that Safari users have no recourse.

The In-Browser Editor has competition from all the content management systems out there—and Dreamweaver CS4’s InContext Editing feature, which does basically the same thing. In-Browser Editing is cool to see and use but in practice I’m not sure it is practical. Users must also connect to the website with the Contribute application before they can work with the site in the browser, which in itself is not a problem but users don’t necessarily need In-Browser Editing if they have Contribute CS4 available.

Compatibility with Flash and Dreamweaver

Contribute CS4 now works more effectively with Flash CS4 Professional and Dreamweaver CS4:

• SWF files can be inserted in webpages.
• Spry widgets are editable in Contribute CS4. I’ve noticed some widgets appear differently in Contribute than they do in Dreamweaver CS4, but editability works well.
• The “What’s New?” page at Adobe.com says Contribute CS4 now works with Dreamweaver templates, but I recall this being the case with Contribute in the past.

Contribute CS4 also has a great new “content expiration notice” feature that will let you know when content needs to be updated based on a date the user specifies. Contribute can execute a default action if no user intervention occurs—the content can be removed, for example. The downside is that “content” refers only to whole pages, not to text in a particular region.

A few other new features

Compared to other CS4 apps, Contribute CS4 has relatively few new features. Here are the rest of them:

• Inline spellcheck: Contribute CS4 will flag misspelled words as you type them. InDesign users have had this feature for years.
• Auto-save documents: Contribute will save drafts after a specified interval. Again, this has been a feature in many applications over the years.
• Relative links: Contribute CS4 will now generate hyperlinks relative to the site root or the webpage itself. Both these options are considered “relative links” (”absolute links” are not relative to anything) but the site root-relative links have the advantage of reaching the same location if the page with the link happens to be moved. This preference can be changed by site administrators and apply to entire websites—this feature cannot be applied to individual webpages.
• Commenting: Reviewers have new commenting features in Contribute CS4.
• Word-to-PDF embedding: Users can convert and embed Word documents as PDFs.

All these feature work properly, but it’s an underwhelming set of features. Very little is groundbreaking here—I probably like the Word-to-PDF conversion the most. These are all good improvements to Contribute, and Contribute CS4 is probably a better application than Contribute CS3, but there are many products out there that do what Contribute does and I think it needs something more if it’s to remain relevant.

Conclusion

I recently shopped around for a developer who would produce a content management system for a client of mine, and his cost for a simple CMS coded in PHP was not much more than a copy of Contribute CS4. Contribute was a valuable product in 2002 but since then open-source content management systems have proliferated and Contribute CS4 needed something to separate itself from its competitors. Contribute CS4 does not have this, and the set of new features is relatively weak.

I do think Contribute CS4 is a good piece of technology and does its job well, but the reasons for choosing it over other options are dwindling.

Contribute CS4
Adobe Systems
US$199 full/$99 upgrade/$799 5-user
Rating: 6/10