Establishing Sitewide Settings


As a Contribute administrator, it's within your control to set a series of far-reaching options. Although some of the choices are targeted to specific administrative concerns, such as setting the password, many of the decisions made in the Administer Website dialog box affect all Contribute users for your site.

In this exercise, you'll examine each of the available categories and make appropriate choices. After you're done, you'll experience one of the key features of Contribute enabled in this section: rollbacks.

Note

Make sure that you're in an Administrator role before beginning these steps.


1.

In Contribute, choose Edit > Administer Websites > DesignDeploy to open the Administer Website dialog box.

The initial category, Users and Roles, was covered in depth in Lesson 11. As you saw in that lesson, all aspects of managing users, assigning roles, and altering role settings are accessible from that category.

2.

Switch to the Administration category and verify that your email address is found in the Contact E-mail Address field.

Because this site is now using the Contribute Publishing Service's User Directory service, Contribute picks up the address from your user settings. The email address entered here appears in Contribute's message bar whenever the administrator is referenced. You might want to enter a different email address for a number of reasons. If your email account allows multiple email addresses, add one that's specifically intended to handle administration-related requests from users and then enter that email address in this category. Most email clients have the ability to create rules or filters that can sort incoming messages with a particular address into a separate folder. Maintaining a folder exclusively for your Contribute administration duties is helpful in managing the requests for help.

Tip

If administration duties are shared by a group of people, use a generic address (for example, contribute.support@bountygeneral.com) that all personnel can access.

The option to Set Administrator Password is currently unavailable because the User Directory service is enabled and you're logged in under the Administrator role. When this option is available, it's strongly recommended that you set a password. This advice takes on particular significance when you remember that manually created connection keys can target any role (even Administrator), and a user with such a connection key could modify the site settings without a password.

3.

Click the Publishing Services category. Verify that both Publishing Services and the User Directory service are enabled (note the Disable Publishing Services and Disable User Directory buttons).

Contribute Publishing Services, including the User Directory, was covered in Lessons 1011. This category of the Administer Website dialog box contains buttons to initiate these services when they are disabled. After these services are enabled, this category also contains links to the Publishing Services console for administrative tasks, and an option to edit the connection. Use this capability to change connections if your site moves to a different server or otherwise changes addresses.

4.

Switch to the Web Server category of the Administer Website dialog box. On the first tab, Web Addresses, click Add to insert a new alternate address for the site. In the Add or Edit Alternate Address dialog box, enter http://localhost/design_deploy_web/ in the available field; click OK when you're done. Select the Index Files tab. Choose the index.html entry and then click Up until your selection is the top entry in the list. Switch to the Guard Page tab and click Find Guard Page. When Contribute indicates that it has detected a valid guard page, click OK.

The Web Server category helps you customize Contribute's interface with your Web server. The first category, Web Addresses, presents a couple of known addressestypically a domain name and an IP addressand allows you to add alternate URLs. These alternate addresses are useful when a user enters an address directly in the Contribute browser's Location field. Any alternate address contained in this list is mapped to the current site.

The Index Files tab lists the possible index page filenames considered by Contribute when displaying a Web address that ends with a folder name; the names are listed in the order considered. For example, after moving index.html to the top of the list, if the company folder includes both index.htm and index.html files, the index.html file is presented when this Web address is entered:www.bountygeneral.com/company/.

New entries can easily be added; when an entry is added, it's moved to the bottom of the list, and the Up button must be used to change its position. Any existing entry can be edited or removed.

The Guard Page tab ensures that administrative folders without an index page cannot be browsed and their contents viewed. When you browse to a folder without an index page, the contents of that folder are displayed in a hyperlinked directory listing; click an entry, and that file is opened in the browser or downloaded. To protect the two administrative folders, _mm and MMWIP, Contribute index filename, index.htm, into eachwhich prevents these folders from being browsed. Clicking Find Guard Page verifies that these pages are in place.

5.

Click the Rollbacks category and then check the Enable Rollbacks option. Accept the default setting of 3 for the number of previous versions of each page.

After rollbacks are enabled, anyone in a role capable of publishing to the site can return a published page to a previous version. When a page is rolled back, the previously published version becomes available as a rollback page itself. At the end of this lesson, you'll see how to roll back a page.

6.

Switch to the New Pages category and make sure that the Default Encoding list is set to Western European. Change the Default File Extension from htm to html.

As noted earlier, the default encoding selection controls the character set of the page. Both this setting and the one determining the default file extension are applied to any new pages created after these options are altered. Contribute does not retroactively change the default encoding or file extensions of existing files.

7.

Click the Compatibility category and verify that the Compatibility Mode option is selected. Click Close when you're done to confirm all your settings and dismiss the Administer Website dialog box.

To make it possible for Contribute 3 to work with earlier versions of Contribute, Macromedia has included the Compatibility category. When the Transition Mode is selected, you can use Contribute 3 to administer the site, but only those users with Contribute 3 installed will be held to the administrative settings. Previous administrative settings still apply. If Compatibility Mode is selected, any users with older versions of Contribute are informed that their connection is no longer valid when they attempt to connect to the site, and asked to contact the administrator.

Let's take a look at the effect of enabling one sitewide administrative setting: rollbacks. To experience how rollbacks works, you'll first need to transfer the file from your Dreamweaver local site to the remote site.

8.

In the Dreamweaver Files panel, expand the depts folder first and then the nutrition folder. Select diet.htm and then click Check In on the Files panel toolbar. When Dreamweaver asks whether you want to include dependent files, click Yes.

To see how the rollback feature works, you need to modify a published page.

9.

In Contribute, select Choose. In the Choose File on Website dialog box, expand first the file root, if necessary, and then the depts folder. Open the nutrition folder and then select diet.htm. Click OK to open the file for browsing. Choose Edit Page.

Only those users whose roles include the option to publish pages can use the rollback feature. In our sample site, both Administrator and Publisher have that option, but Writer doesn't.

10.

Place your cursor between the second picture (the plate of food) and the placeholder text; press Enter (Return) to create a new paragraph. Press the left arrow key and enter the following heading: Diet for life…. From the Style list, choose Heading 4. Select the image tothe left of the newly added heading. From the Image toolbar, click Rotate Counterclockwise twice to turn the picture upside down. When you're done, click Publish; if Contribute displaysa congratulatory message, click OK.

After publishing this pageand because the rollback feature has been enabledContribute actually has stored two versions of the same page. As you'll see in the next step, both the change in the text and the change to the image are capable of being restored to the previous version.

11.

Choose File > Actions > Roll Back to Previous Version. When the Roll Back Page dialog box opens, select the just-saved entry; in the Preview area, scroll down to view the second paragraph to confirm that the original version is intact. Click Roll Back to restore the page. When the page opens, scroll down to the second paragraph to note the reversion.

It's important to note that Contribute maintains previous versions of all changesincluding modifications to graphicsmade in Contribute. If an image is opened in an external graphics editor and altered, the previous version cannot be restored with the rollback feature. However, if you right-click the same image in Contribute, choose Edit in External Application, and then make your changes in the same graphics editor, the previous version is available to be restored.

To complete the demonstration of the rollback feature, bring back the changed page.

12.

Again, choose File > Actions > Roll Back to Previous Version. In the Roll Back Page dialog box, select the entry, verify that the new heading and rotated graphic are present, and click Roll Back. When the page opens, scroll down to see the restored revisions.

Obviously, the rollback feature is an extremely powerful one that can be invaluable. If you find that the initial number of rollbacks is not enough, you can increase the number at any time.



Design and Deploy Websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3(c) Training from the Source
Design and Deploy Websites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute 3: Training from the Source
ISBN: 032128884X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 130
Authors: Joseph Lowery

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