Effective Site Structures

When architecting a Macromedia Dreamweaver site for use in Contribute, the key visual concept to keep in mind is the folder hierarchy. Without additional administrative setup, Contribute users can edit only files found within their root folderand this applies to files within subfolders of their root folder. If you envision a particular folder and all the folders and files underneath it, you'll have a clear picture of what anyone working with those files will be able to affect.

Note

Contribute works hand in glove with server-side network permissions settings and never overrides permissions established by the network operating system. Any files or folders hidden or otherwise made inaccessible by the network remain off-limits to Contribute users, regardless of a user's root folder.

The various roles assigned to the Contribute users of a site or intranet are, for the most part, related to their job responsibilities. A content contributor who works in the human resources (HR) department will be concerned with modifying pages pertaining to HR. Likewise, the manager of the finance department is focused on intranet pages devoted to finance. The most effective site structure from a Contribute perspective is one that's constructed with the Contribute users' roles in mind. If you consider structuring your site according to the organization's general structure, you'll be well on your way to optimizing the site for Contribute.

For example, let's say we have a site for an organization that wants a Web presence for the overall organization and various departments: HR, press relations, and marketing. One approach is to separate the materials for each department into its own folder while keeping the company-related pages in the root. Contribute-wise, this arrangement will certainly work for a relatively small site, but it doesn't allow for much growth; if more than a few pages are used to cover the company information, the root section will get unwieldy. More importantly, anyone given the responsibilities for editing the company pages would also be able to modify pages in any of the other departments. This type of situation should be avoided because it either unnecessarily ties up administrators, forcing them to modify the company pages, or opens the door to users who might be qualified to edit general organizational material but shouldn't have access to other areas.

A far better solution is to regard the organization-oriented pages as a separate category and create a separate folder for those pages. Content contributors to the company pages can then be restricted to working in just that folder and any subsequent subfolders, such as those devoted to annual reports or other company-wide issues. As you'll see in Lesson 11, any roles that require access to more than one department can either be given access to the entire site or targeted to specific folders.

Structuring Large-Scale Sites

The solutions I have described to this point work well for sites with a single Contribute administrator and scale well for larger sites requiring multiple administrators. But if the various divisions of an organization and its corresponding Web site have a large number of content contributors, additional Contribute administrators may be needed for smooth operation. Contribute creates a number of server-side files for each Contribute-defined site, and the Internet paths to these files cannot overlap. For example, let's say a current Contribute site is established with this URL:

http://www.bigco.com/

Every file within this root address would be contained within the Contribute-defined site and ultimately accountable to a single administrator. If you wanted to add administrators for human resources and finance, you first would need to remove the general Contribute administrator and then create two more Contribute sites with root addresses similar to these:

http://www.bountygeneral.com/hr/

http://www.bountygeneral.com/pr/

In other words, the overall site (beginning at www.bountygeneral.com) would not be Contribute enabled, but separate sections (for example, www.bountygeneral.com/hr and www.bountygeneral.com/pr) would be. This structure is expandable to include as many Contribute sites as necessary.