| Throughout this book, you've seen how the talents of a Dreamweaver designer can be optimized to work in a Contribute environment. Let's take a step back now and take a look at the process from the administrator's point of view. To successfully administer a Contribute-enabled site, you'll need to do the following: Compare organization and Web site structures. Examining the organization's structure in relation to the site architecture helps you to determine whether one or more than one Contribute site is needed. This comparison also sets the stage for connecting to the site(s) and working with roles. Collect Web site connection information. You'll need to get key bits of IT-related information. Included in this data are the general URL for the site, as well as any alternate addressincluding the Internet Protocol (IP) addressthat might be used. You'll also need to know the transfer protocol settings, such as the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or other method address, and the user name and password for access. Set up proper permissions. Before Contribute can be deployed, the appropriate access permissions must be granted to the various portions of a site. These permissions might need to be addressed on multiple levels, including the network, Web server, and (if present) the User Directory service. Determine a rollback strategy. Contribute offers the ability to maintain and restore up to 99 previous versions of any page within your site. Whether such rollbacks are enabled (and to what extent) is a decision that affects Contribute users, site administration, and even system hardware. Outline roles and requirements. You'll have to decide which roles are needed and then which options to enable for each role. Develop a clear hierarchical pattern that reflects your organization's structure.
Let's take a closer look at each of these steps in more detail. Comparing Organization and Web Site Structures To make the best fit for Contribute, you need to understand the structure of both the Web site and the organization that is maintaining the Web site. Smaller organizations and their sites are often easily managed by a single Contribute site. With larger organizations and sites, it's often beneficialif not downright necessaryto define a series of subsites within the overall site. Typically, these subsites are defined along departmental lines, with their corresponding folders in the Web site serving as the site roots. The key requirement from an administrative perspective is to make sure that no two Contribute sites have overlapping connection paths. A connection path is the URL address used by Contribute to establish the initial site connection, such as http://www.bountygeneral.com/.Connection paths are said to be overlapped when the folder for one path destination is nested in another. After you create a connection with this address: http://www.bountygeneral.com/hr/
Contribute prevents you from creating connections to this location: http://www.bountygeneral.com/hr/employees/
You can, however, create another connection with this path: http://www.bountygeneral.com/employees/
Each Contribute subsite is administered separately with an individual set of roles and administrative settings. Collecting Web Site Connection Information The core of administering Contribute is establishing connections to the Web server for yourself as administrator and for others as users. To this end, you need to have available the answers to a number of key questions: What is the Internet address (URL) to your Web site? A fully formed absolute address such as http://www.bountygeneral.com/ is required. How do you connect to your Web server? Contribute supports FTP, Secure FTP (SFTP), WebDAV, and network connections. Is a staging server used? A staging server acts as an intermediate step between the content contributors and the live Web site hosted on the production server. For more details, see the sidebar "Establishing a Staging Server" later in this section. What are the setting particulars for your connection? FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV connections require a Web address, user name, and password; a network connection needs only a path to the network folder. What alternate Web addresses are likely to be entered by users? Some Web sites have multiple addresses that all point to the same site. For example, to help visitors find their site, bountygeneral.com might also own the domain names for bountygeneral.net and bountygeneral.org. IT administrators might prefer to use the site's IP address: http://66.165.99.110. Which filenames are used in folders for the index page? Because users often enter just the path to the folder when they want to see the folder's main page, Contribute allows you to specify which index page to look for. Which filename extension should be used when created new pages? Some organizations standardize on .html, whereas others prefer .htm. If server-side includes (SSIs) are used extensively, .shtml, .shtm or a server modelspecific extension such as .asp or .cfm might be required. What is the default encoding for new pages? On a Web page, the encoding controls the character set rendered on the page. In the United States, many designers use the Western European encoding; this encoding, by the way, is the default option in Dreamweaver. However, if you're developing pages for another region or language, you might choose a different encoding. For sites that include multiple languages and/or symbols on a single page, the Unicode or UTF-8 encoding is often selected. Is a compatible user directory service available? CPS supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Microsoft's Active Directory user directory service.
As a designer for the site, you know some of the information off the top of your head. Other bits will come from someone who works with the network infrastructure. If your organization is large enough to support a network, one or more people in IT or a similar department are likely to have this information. Establishing a Staging Server Staging servers provide a different level of security for a Web site. By posting modified pages to a central server in which they can be verified before posting publicly, you ensure that no unauthorized changes are published to the Web. A staging server is typically behind a firewall, so another degree of security is attained because only the appropriate IT personnel have access to the production server. To use a staging server with Contribute, all connection information must come from the staging server rather than the production server. Modified pages are then published from within Contribute to the staging server, where they remain until pushed live. All the same roles and approval system can be used with no variation. You might want to be selective in publishing entire folders of pages, however. Contribute creates a number of hidden folders to handle administrative tasks; for an additional amount of security, they should not be transferred to the production server: _mm contains user and draft information. _baks stores the backup files for rollback operations. MMWIP (Macromedia Works In Progress) stores drafts of unpublished pages. _notes stores Dreamweaver design notes and other metadata about individual files.
The _mm, _baks, and MMWIP folders exist at Contribute's site root and can be easily avoided. Although these folders don't contain any sensitive information, it's best to configure your Web-copying software to leave them on the staging server. |
Setting Up Proper Permissions Contribute puts a premium on Web server and site security. To edit a specific Web page, the typical user must have permission from as many as four levels of security: Network operating system. Within a network, certain folders on a system are designated as shared; folders that are not shared are not accessible by other computers on the network. This restriction applies to Internet and intranet access as well. Access might be restricted based on the group a visitor belongs to, or to a single user. Additionally, certain folders within a server operating system are designated as hidden from standard Web servers. For example, on Windows systems, naming a folder with a leading underscore character (for example, _baks) is enough to prevent the folder from being listed in Contribute's Choose dialog box. Web server. Within a Web server, administrators can control access to specific folders on a case-by-case basis. Permission to read, write, or browse the contents of a folder might be applied separately or collectively; for example, you can set one folder to be browsed and the contents read, but not written toeffectively blocking the pages from being modified. Web server permissions are applied to all users. Directory service. Users within a directory service such as LDAP or Active Directory are members of a workgroup. The directory service administrator can grant or deny access to specific folders (as well as specific servers), depending on the user's workgroup. This degree of control can be used to limit certain users to work only on the intranet portion of a site rather than the public-facing portion. Contribute roles. Contribute roles can be restricted to working within one or more specific folders on a site. If a folder is made accessible, any subfolders contained within it are also available unless prohibited by another permissions protocol.
Contribute never overrides a previously established permission setting. For example, you cannot gain write access to a folder in Contribute that is restricted by the Web server. As the Contribute administrator, it's your job to make sure that all users have proper access to the folders they are assigned to work with. One approach is to give all users permission to the entire site as far as the network, Web server, and (if used) user directory are concerned, and then limit them to their specific working folders within their Contribute roles. This technique allows for you to change a user's role, if necessary, without reconfiguring permissions. Determining a Rollback Strategy If you enable rollback capability for your site, Contribute keeps a copy of each of the modified and published pages in its original pre-changed state. You can store from 1 to 99 versions of your pages; if you have more than one rollback saved, you can choose to publish any one of the available versions. When considering whether to allow rollbacks or not, you need to realize that, with the rollback option enabled, anyone who can publish a page in a folder can roll back any pages within that same folder. If you decide to enable rollbacks, you also need to decide how many versions you want to store. A good general rule is to look at the amount of space taken by all the files managed by Contribute for the entire site, including HTML and dependent documents, and then divide that into your system's available storage. The resulting whole number, rounded down, provides the maximum number of rollback versions you can support. Tip You'll see how to enable rollbacks later in this lesson.
Outlining Roles and Requirements The proper use of roles is a key factor in deploying Contribute successfully. Not only can roles be used to target specific folders, but also to reinforce an organization's hierarchical structure. Determining the number of roles to define and the scope of each role is a collective decision, not a solitary one. You have to coordinate with your organization's management to figure out which roles are necessary. A spreadsheet is an effective tool for listing the various roles and the state of their relative options. By visually depicting them, you'll find that only a limited number of roles have widely different sets of options, even in a large organization. Implementing similar roles is then a very straightforward process because you can base a new role on an existing one. |
