[Web4lib] Contribute opinions?

[Pons, Lisa (ponslm)]

We're an academic library-but I will weigh in. 

We have about 32 users using Contribute with Dreamweaver templates. I
have certain areas locked down so people can only edit their content.
We've been doing this for awhile now,starting with Contribute 1.0!

For the most part, it has worked well for us. We had early problems with
connections,and more, but things have stabilized. We do training and now
have tutorials up on our intranet site. 

Our editors, as we call them, are allowed to post immediately, so I
don't approve or check pages before they go up, but it is nice to know I
could!Some users are confused about using images, and making them
smaller for the web, so I also limit the image/file sizes for this
reason.Some of our users would like more functionality, but really, they
don't need it, Contribute does what we need it to do.

Incidentally, in Contribute I have different settings for our Intranet
vs. Internet site. Our public site is much more locked down, images are
much more restricted, styles are restricted, etc...In addition, I also
have assigned 3 or 4 roles within each of our connections.

One feature that has proved handy: roll back. We keep at least one
previous version of a page, and in some cases we have made errors and
then published it. Roll back allows users, or me, to quickly restore the
old version.

On the technical side, I use Server Side includes throughout our
templates, so have not had to touch the template structure in over 2
years to do our redesign: just changed the stylesheets and the includes
and that is that. This is handy on sites with thousands of pages and
where you have many Contribute users as we found early on that some
people would edit while I was updating, etc...

Lastly, I will say that our college also has a CMS. I found it kind of
clunky to use. For now, we find Contribute meets our needs nicely. Given
the time and labor involved in getting into a CMS, we don't have plans
to change for the immediate future.

One Contribute negative: our site is laid out using CSS alone, and
Contribute had a heck of a time rendering the design in edit mode.
Non-editable areas overlaid editable areas, etc...So, we had to
basically load some of the stylesheets with javascript so Contribute
wouldn't see them. I then had to break out the stylesheet into two
sheets, one for layout, which Contribute cannot see, and one for text
and other content formatting, which Contribute users can use. Thus, our
editors do not see the page exactly as it will look when published, but
everyone seems used to it at this point.

HTH!

Lisa Pons-Haitz
University Libraries
University of Cincinnati





> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Nancy Eaton
> Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 11:39 AM
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: [Web4lib] Contribute opinions?
> 
> Does anyone have thoughts and/or opinions about Adobe's 
> Contribute? (Ha!
> Like I think maybe some of you DON'T!) So the question really 
> is, will you share them?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> Nancy Eaton
> Duluth Public Library
> Duluth, MN
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