Contribute from Macromedia

[bradyj]

I have a friend I'm going to design a webpage for as all good designer friends get suckered into doing:)

However, I want him to update this thing without getting bogged down with the coding methods. 1) Because he's a family/business man who probably will give up, which leads us to 2) Love him to death, but this isn't his thing, and he doesn't have the capacity, or time, for it.

So I thought this Contribute program -- seems a cheap and viable solution. I've downloaded the test version three, and it is a little odd. I see how I can admin him and all that, but I don't see how I can create editable/non-editable regions for him without using DreamWeaver. There HAS to be a way for me to handcode in BBEdit what I want to control, and then use contributes functions to block out the other stuff (no font tags, etc.).

So, my questions:
1. How can I handcode editable/non-editable regions?
2. Do I have to make 'templates' or can the user just upload to the file directly?
3. Anyone have any positive and/or horror stories about this program? Would be much appreciated:)

[rmedek]

No answers here, just more questions :)

I downloaded Contribute also and am checking it out. Not sure if there's a way to have the user edit a page without it adding all sorts of extraneous markup. Have you spent any time with the program so far?

I'm considering using this or learning PHP to solve my client admin problems. Any suggestions?

-Rich

[bradyj]

<!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="Products" -->
<img...
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->

<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="News" -->
<div id="newscontent">
<h1>News</h1>
<h2>Industry event 7/24/2004</h2>
<p>something something...</p>
<!-- InstanceEndEditable -->


You can do repeat edits and regular editable areas is what I've learned so far. If you go into your administrator preferences, you can create a profile for a user and then email them a key to connect that way -- that is the strong part. The key you send them allows you to control what they can and cannot do -- you can turn off font tags, turn off allowing them to add images or html directly -- you can hide certain CSS elements and allow them to only pick the CSS you want... couple that with putting the editable elements on there (which then makes everything else not editable) and you can stop them from touching anything you don't want -- yeah, I was a but turned off by the program, but I think it would be rather useful now. The version 3 has some excellent controls and CSS controls on there that I wasn't aware of.