There are two classes of people who'll be doing the contributing here. Designers who will either create page layouts for their sites from scratch or cheat by using one of the many ready-made templates.

Content creators who will want to put text, pictures, Flash animations, and whatever else that goes into making a site worth its existence. Today, you need some knowledge of HTML and other Web applications to play both these roles. However, with the simplicity of Contribute, all of us have a chance of donning both the mantles.

Why not download the technology preview version of Macromedia Contribute and take it for a spin? You'll discover a few more surprises along the way.

How it works
At the heart of Macromedia Contribute are two familiar components that run the show. The Internet Explorer browsing engine allows you to browse any site as you normally would in a browser of your choice. When you wish to edit a particular page, just hit the Edit Page button. This will launch the Dreamweaver HTML authoring engine to download the page with all its text and graphic elements onto your computer, and Contribute slips into editing mode.

For those of you who are not designers, Dreamweaver is the most popular Web page creation software around. With these two components, Contribute effectively gives you a reliable "edit-on-demand" access to the World Wide Web.

Of course, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that you can edit a Web site only if you own it. That means you need to be able to login to the site with a username and password over the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). If you don't know what FTP is, you most probably don't own a piece of real estate on the Web. You can sign up for free webspace at Tripod or FortuneCity.

Create a connection
Once Contribute recognises your ownership of a site, it will let you edit it. As soon as you fire up the program, you will see a screen that gives you the option of creating a new connection. Click on it to launch the Connection Wizard.

The steps to follow after that are relatively straightforward and are described in this animation. Basically, you need to provide your FTP username and password so that Contribute can access the files on the server.

Selecting a page
One of the ways to select a page for editing is to browse to it. The other is to use the Choose button when you are already on a site that you own, and navigate through the site structure and pick a file. One of the useful and timesaving features of Contribute is that it provides a live preview of Web pages and images as you navigate. There's a mini-browser within every dialog box, making Contribute a highly visual tool.

View screenshot.

Editing a page
When a page is opened in edit mode, you can right-click at different locations -- on tables, images, background - to control the various aspects of the page content and design. Again, wherever possible, Macromedia has kept it visual. You will never have to enter hexadecimal colour codes or specify table width.

When you're satisfied, press Publish, and all the modified files from the hard disk will be uploaded onto the server. You can test your page live in any browser. Not satisfied? Go to File > Roll Back... and the page will revert to its old form. Little features like this enhance Contribute's user-friendliness.

Contribute is fine when small text and colour changes have to be made to Web pages. However, if many changes have to be made across a site, it can be terribly slow because all text and images have to be downloaded and uploaded each time. It helps to have a good Internet connection. However, you can work in an offline mode while editing and reconnect when you want to publish. Experienced users will appreciate that Contribute does not mangle the existing HTML code of a Web page.

Teamwork support
The Export Wizard is another useful feature. The tool allows site admins to create an encrypted data package comprising FTP login and setup information. This package can then be sent to other Contribute users by email or shared on the network and used to configure their software. Admins can have any number of users auto-configure their Contribute without having to send passwords in the open.

If you work in an online content team, you can immediately see the benefit of this.

Everybody wins
When Macromedia Contribute is officially launched in December 2002, it will retail at $99 per single license. Sure, that will work out expensive for large content teams, but in such cases, there's no substitute for a good content management system. However, for small operations where editors tweak HTML in Notepad, the time and effort saved using Contribute may well make up for the investment.

If you want to create new pages, Contribute has a wide range of templates in categories like business, personal, calendars, projects, meetings, and reports. But these are simple table-based layouts from the old school of Web design. When editing pages that use Cascading Style Sheets, Contribute recognises the styles and gives the user an easy way to update them. Contribute's emphasis on staying away from the nitty-gritties of coding means there isn't an option to view source.

Clearly, Macromedia Contribute doesn't differentiate between professional users and hobbyists. It's aimed at anyone for whom Web editing and publishing is a minor but necessary requirement rather than a core function.

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