New Tool in the Toolkit

Macromedia's Contribute is a great tool for anyone wanting to publish static pages to the Inter/Intranet without having to learn the Hyper-Text Markup Language! I am using it to create content for my "Intranet Server Project".

This tool works well and doesn't require files to be kept locally. You browse to the page you want to edit, then click the edit button at the top of the page, edit the content or add content, and then click the publish button to make the change live. You can store previous versions of the page and have the ability to rollback to a previous version. In the default installation, 3 previous versions are saved, more or less can be configured.

Setting up a site only requires either FTP or file/network access to the web directory that stores the content. Once the connection is set up, then it is point and click, WYSIWYG editor, publish content. Contribute works well with Dreamweaver, so you can do page layout in Dreamweaver, and content addition or editing in Contribute. This greatly simplifies the web designers job, create the custom templates and let regular content providers add the "magnet" content to the site with out ever having to futz around with the templates.

I am impressed with the product, and am building a business case for deploying it within my day-job organization for content providers on our Intranet.