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Adobe Contribute 4 Review |
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Written by Don Lee
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Monday, 13 November 2006 |
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Page 1 of 2  Adobe Contribute 4 is the latest edition of this web publishing
application and there is plenty to be excited about. The developer has
not only made the web publishing process even easier but they have
added blogging capabilities. A clear example of the program’s ease of
use is the fact that the software is accompanied by two quick start
guides instead of a huge user manual. Here is what I discovered about
Adobe Contribute 4.
Let’s take a look at the web publishing side first as this is the program’s bread and butter.
Time to Publish
Using Contribute 4 to manage your hosted blog is even easier than you could have imagined. I used my WordPress account for Contribute 4 but take notice that the program offers support to other popular blogging services such as Blogger and TypePad. If you are using another type of blog service, Contribute 4 offers support as long as you can provide the access point, username and password for your account.
Once you have established that information, you can have a direction connection to your blog to do updates and create new content. If you are one of those who have a website and a blog, Contribute 4 provides a pulldown menu at the top of the interface with all of your configured sites listed. Just select one from the menu and you’re automatically switched over. Then make your changes, click the publish button and switch back to your other project. Now that’s quick and easy updating with minimal effort.
If you are developing a site for a client, you can create your template and lock certain parts of the template to ensure the website’s appearance and integrity. Your client can continue to input and update content on the website but you will still maintain control of the website and you can implement site wide changes without having to worry about individual page updates.
Contribute 4’s toolbar interface contains all of the basic web design features such as linking, inserting images, inserting tables and even spell checking. You will also find some basic text formatting features as well.
Now after I set up Contribute to manage my WordPress blog account, I logged into my account and opened up the main page by clicking on the Edit Entry button on the toolbar. In a blink of the eye, my blog’s main page went from display mode to editing mode. Now all I have to do is make my changes or create a new blog entry and click the Publish button. Very easy to maintain your blog no matter how often you update it or the content that you are publishing.
You can keep track of all of your blog links by setting up trackback URLs to previous blog entries or external links. I found that once you enter a trackback that you can no longer edit or delete it. This was disappointing because to fix a trackback you have to go back to the blog and recreate a new trackback. Being that a blog normally contains plenty of links, it would be very helpful to have trackback URLs editable in future Contribute versions.
Contribute 4 is integrated into the Internet Explorer toolbar (also supports the latest Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista), as well as the latest Dreamweaver and Microsoft Office, which means that you can edit and publish directly from those programs.
While most of the features of Contribute 4 are available for both the Macintosh and Windows versions, you should be aware of the few features that are Windows only. Some of the features that are Windows only include publishing to your blog directly from your web browser. Publishing to your website or blog from inside Microsoft Office is also a Windows-only feature. The ability to open and edit a webpage from inside of your browser is also only for Windows users. It is a shame that Macintosh users don’t get these features because they are pretty useful. Maybe these features can be added in the next version of Contribute for the Mac.
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