Enabling Contribute Compatibility

Macromedia Contribute is a program (included with Macromedia Studio 8) that is used primarily by nontechnical users, such as content editors who might have little or no experience creating, editing, or managing Websites. Contribute gives Web developers the ability to share the responsibility for editing and updating your site with a team while maintaining control over the design, style, code, and structure of the site. As the administrator of a Website, you can set a variety of options to control the site, including setting user access to specific sections of the site on an individual basis and specifying style sheets (covered in Lesson 4) and templates (covered in Lesson 13) for content editors to use.

Note

A 30-day trial version of Contribute 3 can be downloaded from Macromedia's Website.

1.	Choose Site > Manage Sites, select the Yoga Sangha project site and click the Edit button. The Site Definition for Yoga Sangha dialog box opens.
2.	Click the Advanced tab if it is not already selected. Choose Contribute in the Category list and click the Enable Contribute compatibility box. Note If Design Notes and Check In/Out are not both enabled prior to enabling Contribute, a message appears to inform you that working with Contribute requires the Design Notes and Check In/Out features of Dreamweaver to be enabled. Click OK to enable both. After enabling, there are several other settings that display: Site root URL: The full URL of the Website that you are setting up to administer should be typed in this text field in the Contribute section of the Site Definition dialog box. (The Advanced tab of the Site Definition dialog box should be active.) After typing in the URL, click the Test button to verify that Dreamweaver can connect to the site you specified. Administration: The Administer Site In Contribute button opens Contribute and allows you to set the administrative settings, such as controlling access to the site. For this to function, the Macromedia Contribute program must be installed on your computer. All other settings and options for administering a Contribute site are set in Contribute. If you do not have Contribute installed on your computer, you will not be able to proceed with the rest of this exerciseyou can click Cancel to close the Site Definition dialog box and click Done to close the Manage Sites dialog box.
3.	Click the Administer Site in Contribute button. Click the radio button on Dreamweaver-style editing and click Yes. If this is the first time that this site is administered using Contribute, you have to decide between the following two editing experiences: Standard word processing: Applies inline CSS styles to each new p tag. The CSS styles defined for a Website usually cause paragraphs to be rendered closer together. This style is often more familiar to users who have worked with desktop-publishing applications, which provide greater typographic control. Users can include more space between paragraphs by pressing Enter twice to add a standard HTML paragraph (p) tag. Dreamweaver-style editing: As with Web page editors, adds standard HTML paragraphs using p tags. When a user presses the Enter key, Contribute adds the HTML p tag; browsers display a blank line between paragraphs that use the p tag. Note A drawback of using inline CSS styles causes more complex markup tags to be added to the page. This can make the HTML structure of the page less clear to Web designers who view the HTML tags. After choosing, you will see the Administer Websites dialog box with yourself added in the Administrator role.
4.	Click Close to close the Administer Websites dialog box. A dialog box will appear asking if you want to leave the Administrator password empty. Click No to change the Administer Websites dialog box to the Administration category and to set the Administrator password. In the Administration dialog box, click the Set Administrator Passsword button. Set the password as password. You will need to enter the password a second time to confirm, then click OK. Click Close to close the Administer Websites dialog box.
5.	Select the Remote Info category and uncheck the Enable File Check In And Check Out box. Click OK in the Site Definition dialog box and Done in the Manage Sites dialog box.

Because you are not creating the Yoga Sangha project site with a team, the Check In/Out feature is not necessary. The rest of this book assumes that you have Check In/Out disabled.

Creating a Connection in Contribute

If you have a well-designed Website using templates and CSS, you can easily have end users create and modify pages without being able to change or harm the underlying design of your pages.

These steps can be performed only if you have Contribute installed on your computer.

1) Launch Contribute. Within the Address bar type the URL to the Yoga Sangha site represented in the Lesson_14_Sites folder by using this URL: http://localhost/yogaRemote/Lesson_14_Sites/index.html.

You will view the Yoga Sangha home page. Above the home page will be a note that you have not yet created a connection to this Website.

2) Click the Create Connection button. Click Next to begin the Connection Wizard.

The Connection Wizard allows you to create a connection to the Website. Once created, you can then begin to create and maintain pages in your Website using Contribute.

End users usually will not create their own connections because you do. As an Administrator you will usually set up users and send out connection keys, so end users do not have to know the inner workings of the connection.

3) Click Next because the URL to the Website is already filled in for you. Select Local/Network as your connection method. Click the Choose button and select the remote folder:C:\inetpub\wwwroot\yogaRemote\Lesson_14_Sites. Click Next.

You can connect to a Website that uses Contribute by using FTP, Secure FTP, Local/Network or WebDAV.

4) On the User Information step of the Connection Wizard, fill in your name and e-mail address. Click Next and then click Done to finish the wizard.

If you have multiple copies of Contribute, use a different user name for each machine that has a copy. For example, Bob(laptop), and Bob(Mac). Using the same user name can cause problems because you can override checkouts you make on the other computer.

You are now ready to maintain the Web pages in the Yoga Sangha site.