Adobe Contribute
Macromedia Contribute, or better Adobe Contribute, is actually not a CMS but rather a user-friendly authoring tool. The main difference with a true CMS is the fact that it is file based instead of database driven. All content is stored in HTML files hence there is no separation of content and presentation. This imposes rather severe limitations on maintenance and manageability of a site because it is not flexible to change for instance the navigation. This also complicates creation of multi-lingual sites (how can you relate different language versions of a content block ?).
To overcome this major drawback we have designed database-driven, multi-lingual navigation components in both .NET and Java. In that way we turn Contribute into a low-end CMS with a negligible licensing cost.
The main
advantages of Contribute are its licensing cost and the ease of use of the
WYSIWYG editor.
Disadvantages include scalability, lack of database use (see remark above) and no
options for content reuse. Note too that editing the site is not web-based; Contribute needs to be
installed locally and requires access to the file system of the web server via LAN or FTP.
Hereunder some of its features:
- User-friendly editing with preview in browser, spell-checking and drag&drop from MS Word and Excel
- Check-in / check-out and versioning (with rollback) (albeit on file system level)
- Basic workflow to publish content in three easy steps: browse to a page, edit – with possibility to preview – and publish). Via e-mail notification you can invite another author to review changes.
- A central administration module in which an administrator can e.g. define permission groups to specify who can edit certain parts of the site.
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