Hi everybody,

I'm part of team that's using Dreamweaver 8 and Contribute 3.11 to create templates for a charity organization. These templates will be handed off to their local chapters and used to create local-level sites. Each chapter offers somewhat different services, so we cannot lock down the sites' navigational structure. This means they need to be able to edit the secondary navigation in particular in order to suit their needs.

We were intending to separate off the nav into an include file; however, we discovered that Contribute seems to have some issues with SSI. Specifically, we can't find a way to both allow them to edit the file and maintain some sort of guidance over the ways that they can modify it. When we try to put Dreamweaver-style tags into the include file to tell Contribute how to behave, the system displays a string of error messages and then the selectivity of the editing breaks down for both the page calling the include and the include itself. (The blue boxes marking editable areas remain, but the Contribute user is actually able to edit anything on the page.)

I'm aware that they can edit include files by navigating directly to the file, but we were hoping to maintain some fashion on control on how they perform those edits. If we leave out the template tags, the entire file is alterable and this will eventually cause some problems. On the other hand, if we move the nav out of the includes and into the pages themselves, then they have to edit each and every page in a consistant fashion. If we leave out the tags and still use includes, there is no way to control the edits made there by the local chapters.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to get around this problem? The string of errors suggests a bug, but searches for a patch have come up with nothing. Is there anyway to provide controllable editting of include files in Contribute, or will we have to place the content inside of each page in order to achieve that goal? Any ideas will be gratefully received!

BPDean