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Contribute Meets a Need

January 17, 2003 by Walter Strong

Some clients NEED to have access to their pages so a good designer is going to make editable areas available to them, and template pages to meet their needs. Other parts of the site will be too complex and need to be restricted. The cost per user is not significant when the client feels that they have gained access to portions of the site they deem to be important...either from an interest in their clients and site visitors or from a need to satisfy their own ego-related issues.

This is a relatively modest tool and, if Macromedia is smart, it will become increasingly functional while preserving the more complicated parts of the pages from damage due to civilian cockpit error.

Poll not very effective

January 17, 2003 by Todd Prouty

I agree with Walter's review, but must say that this poll is not very effective as a guage of opinions on Contribute. All options but one are negative, and "Fantastic product!" is overwhelmingly positive. A couple middle-ground options would be nice in cases such as mine, where the jury is still out. Some of my sites are probably too dynamic, but some smaller clients may have a need for a product like this.

Contribute

March 9, 2003 by Athos Toxo_Q

I'm busy for 3 days now to figure out how my client could work with Contribute.

The tutorials is really bad. What does *.html.LCK? mean, where are my templatesfolder? Why is is loading just a part of the images? Why does it take such a long time before there is a connection with my server? etc. 

Let Macromedia work it out first, now Contribute is a pain in the ass.

 

Forgettaboutit

March 26, 2003 by Tim Burke

I don't know much about the product yet, but from what I've seen, you have to buy into the Macromedia method of having a page template, where you lock down everything except the area in the page you want them to edit.  This may work for simple designs and layouts, but I don't have that many simple designs and layouts.  Also, I don't use Macromedia's products exactly the way they would like me to.  I never use a page template, and I'm not interested in doing it now.  I use ASP to build an administrative backend which allows them to update the copy on particular pages.  They never touch my actual pages, or open an HTML editor. 

TB

Macromedia Contribute

June 19, 2003 by Kathlyn Gadd

For most of my customers, whether I offer them a custom CMS or an off the shelf product like Contribute, it makes no difference - their response is usually exactly the same.  Update content, no way - that's what they pay me to do - they certainly haven't got the time or inclination to do it themselves...!!  

I would also have the same problem as other posters - even if they did have a rush of enthusiasm for maintaining the site content themselves - I rarely use DW templates and would find a custom db solution a more useful means of allowing them control over the site content. 

 

Good Tool - with specific uses

August 29, 2003 by Diane McHutchison

My team is in the process of doing the work to pull together a business case to bring Macromedia Contribute in as a "core" tool.

It's showing its value by allowing us to offload the non-technical, repeating tasks (post minutes, update calendar, etc.) to non-technical administrative staff.

Any chance that anyone has some documented cost savings that we can use (without names, of course) in our case?

Thanks!

Contribute wastes my time......

June 2, 2006 by Andrew Harrisson

I have one customer who went out and bought a copy without my knowledge. He thinks that it will do everything that Studio 8 will do at a quarter of the price and he's on the phone 3 or 4 times a day asking me to check his page(s) to see what's gone wrong. When I send him a bill for my time he say's he did the work so why are you charging me? Macromedia made a big mistake when they brought that damn product out.

No way...

September 21, 2006 by Bachir El Charif

Well like alot of programmer they hate to show the customer the code because sometimes the custmer just copy them and try to make something by him self and that is very bad, about the CMS i tried to install more than once some finished components that help the user to update his pages by himself and as Andrew said the customer keep calling to know what's gone wrong.

so i developed my own CMS in 5 months i know its too much, but the last version is so perfect for me and for my customers and give them the rights to change specific areas in the page (Like Menu, news, calendar, banners, users, voting, newsletter, colors, css and much much more) without actualy see anything of the real code or make mistakes.