What is the Macromedia Web Publishing System?
Macromedia Web Publishing System (WPS) has been used in the past to describe the collection of software applications and server components Macromedia offers. The company doesn’t seem to be using that moniker anymore, but the software is still there. In addition to Dreamweaver, Contribute, Flash and Fireworks for content creation and editing, the WPS includes Contribute Publishing Server for additional user and document management.
Contribute Publishing Server
Macromedia Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) is software installed on the webserver. CPS provides a method to centrally manage publishing access and a way to track publishing activities. IT Administrators will appreciate CPS for its integration with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers─including Microsoft’s Active Directory. If your organization already uses Active Directory, the time savings can be worth the extra cost. If you don’t already use an LDAP server, you generally won’t bother with this option. For some sites with dozens or hundreds of contributors, there are a number of useful features. Beyond this brief introduction, I won’t be discussing WPS or CPS.
What do I Need to Purchase?
Everyone who will be editing, reviewing or administering pages in Contribute will need to have a full version installed and running on their machine. If you already have Dreamweaver, you still need a copy of Contribute if you are going to administer or edit Contribute pages. If you have several designers on staff, you may choose one or two that will handle Contribute, while the rest stay in Dreamweaver.
Contribute costs $149/user. If you buy 6 at a time, it costs $699. If you purchase larger chunks of licenses the price goes down further. CPS costs $89/user and the license cost decreases depending on the total number of users administered through the system. I would consult with your IT Department (unless you ARE the IT department) and discuss the long-term goals. If you might use LDAP or want to support more than 10 Contribute users, it will likely be worth the extra cost and time to implement CPS.
Site setup in Contribute
A full set of product manuals and documentation is freely available at Macromedia.com: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/contribute. Of course that makes for a lot of dry reading and some of the common pitfalls are not addressed. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the settings available when administering a Contribute site.
Zac earned his BFA in graphic design at New MexicoStateUniversity. In the years before college, he wrote, drew, and published comic books. In the years since college, he's worked as a graphic designer for three large B2B distributors creating catalogs, web sites, and multimedia presentations.