So how about some more on Contribute?

November 18, 2002 | 1 Comments

Well, I spent quite a bit of time looking at it Contribute last week, and for the most part I’m impressed. We were able to get it up and running right away and were able to make updates to the intranet quickly and easily. I like the work-flow options and the fact that with DW templates you can lock a user out of important code. It seems very easy to set up and get running and I think it’d be quite a bit easier to teach a non-technical person how to use than either our CMS or FrontPage.

The best feature in my mind is the way a user can browse through a site and then, if the proper permissions are there, they can just hit the edit button and start editing. I think this will help adoption of the tool, as it give the user a sense that they have control and can be involved a bit more in the upkeep of their site. Well that and the fact that it doesn’t add all sorts of crappy markup to the pages - at least not that I saw. Oh and as far as the actual pages are concerned there is no proprietary technology needed. Oh yeah and then there is the cost - compared to the CMS solutions I’ve seen Contribute offers most of the functionality, and a whole lot more flexibility, for a very, very small fraction of the cost.

It wasn’t all rosy, for some reason I couldn’t connect from my PC at work to ANYTHING outside via FTP. Hopefully this can be worked out, and it’s very possible it could have been a firewall issue. I’m not too worried about that, as the main reason we are looking at this is for the Intranet and internal users.

I’m sure I’ll have more information as time goes on, but for now I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up and can’t wait to get it up and running for our Intranet. I think it’ll save the organization a bit of money and our Web team lots of time. Not to mention hopefully help make our Intranet a more-up-to-date, more collaborative and useful business tool for the whole organization.

I don’t think this is a cure-all by any means, but for those sites where there is no real reason to have the content in a database (I never understood why you’d need HTML markup in a database - and truth be told that is how lots of CMS systems work - by serving up markup. But that is a whole other story), or a central repository and those sites that don’t fall into the heavily-trafficked-highly-visible and vitally-important-to-the-organization category (most of the stuff on our intranet) Contribute seems to fit the bill very well. I can also see it being absolutely perfect for small, purely informational sites it seems like always take up way to much of my time to maintain.

Oh, Web Monkey has a review as well.

Filed under: Web Development