Contribute CS3 and CS4 are compatible with Windows 7. For details please check the Creative Suite FAQ for full Windows 7 at http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq/
Adobe Contribute Contribute Publishing Server 
Go to your 25th blog entry in 2 clicks!!
How I can go to my 25th blog entry? I have so many entries in my blog. Here Contribute gives hand in jumping to your 25th blog entry in 2 clicks. Contribute makes your life easy in WYSIWYG editing and viewing the contents of any entry in 2 clicks.
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Transition and Compatibility Mode
Wondering why after the migration the Contribute users for the website are not able to connect to the site? What can be the reason?
Contribute offers two compatibility options to the Site Administrators — one that allows users with earlier versions to work on the website, and one that does not. Following steps can be used to go to the settings:
Transition mode: In this mode, users of earlier versions of Contribute can continue working on the website, along with Contribute CS4 users. This lets you evaluate the new version and set up new roles and permissions without disrupting users with earlier versions of Contribute. Site administrators use the Transition mode temporarily for some time after the migration and once they are ready, all users can transition to Contribute CS4 and then Compatibility mode can be enabled.
Compatibility mode: In this mode, all users must use Contribute CS4. Users with earlier versions cannot work on the website and will get the following error.
Using Contribute, you can easily post content such as news items to your blog from RSS aggregators. You can set Contribute as your blog publishing tool in RSS aggregators such as FeedDemon (Windows) and NetNewsWire (Mac OS). You can post your favorite or interesting news clips to your blog and also add your own comments before you post it.
Enter Contribute in the Name text box.
Enter the command in the Command-line or URL text box. To enter the command, browse to the location where the contribute.exe file is located on your hard disk. After you select the file and the path appears in the Command Line text box, click the cursor at the end of the path; enter one space and type -mmPostToBlog.
To verify whether Contribute is successfully configured in FeedDemon, do the following:
Video workflow on RSS Aggregators Configuration and how it works with Contribute.
How to configure NetNewsWire on Mac?
In the Weblog editor application pop-up menu, browse to the location of the contribute.app file.
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Do you want manage Google Analytics using Contribute? Do you want embed YouTube video into webpage?’ You can achieve this easily in Contribute. To know how to achieve this, read on….
Contribute being a Simple WYSIWYG tool how power user would add codes on fly? For example, you can insert code snippets that run video or audio files in your web or blog pages. However, you can add code snippets only if the website Administrator has granted the relevant permission to your user role.
If the website Administrator has not enabled the Allow HTML Snippet Insertion option for your user role, the HTML Snippet option in the Insert menu will be disabled. However, this option is enabled by default, for blog entries.
How to insert HTML code snippets in web pages or Blog entries?
1. Create a new web page or blog entry.
2. Otherwise browse to a web page or blog entry and click Edit page or Edit Entry.
3. Place the insertion point in your draft where you want to insert the HTML code snippet.
4. Select Insert -> HTML Snippet.
5. The Insert HTML Snippet dialog box appears.
6. Type the code snippet, or insert the HTML code snippet you have copied from another source.
7. Click OK.
It’s done. The HTML code snippet is executed in the pertinent draft.
We will go with the real time use case. For example, you found an interesting video in the youtube.com
and you like to embed that video in the your site. It’s very simple, copy the embed code from the right side panel
In Contribute, create a new page and select Insert à HTML Snippet menu and paste the copied code in the Insert HTML Snippet dialog. Click OK in the Insert HTML Snippet dialog and publish the page to embed the video.
The video will be embedded fine.
Another real time example is Inserting Google Analytics code. To give a brief about Google Analytics, is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.
Create an account in Google Analytics, register your website and get the Google Analytics code, paste in web page using HTML Snippet, for which you need the statistics.
Video demo for the insertion HTML Snippet in web page or blog entry.
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One of the important tasks in web content management is the review process. Any content created needs to be reviewed by a set of people/reviewers before the content goes live to the website. Reviewing a content using other traditional methods like mail becomes time consuming and is more likely to be error-prone. Also, the review does not adhere to a workflow. And also tracking the reviewer comments is a tedious task when the review process involves multiple reviewers. Hence getting the content reviewed by multiple users in a short span of time and tracking their comments becomes a challenge.
Contribute CS4 brings in the feature “Annotation Mode of Review” to make the review process simpler, easier and reliable. This feature helps the users to add the comments on the review draft and still maintaining the original draft intact.
Let’s have a look at how Annotation Mode of Review works in Contribute CS4
Once he clicks the “Send for Review”, Send dialog appears, which enables him to choose the list of Contribute Users to whom he wants to send the draft for review.
In the above case he selects two users, Chandra and Krishna. He provides some description in the text box, which will appear in the status bar for all the reviewers. He completes the sending process by clicking Send button.
Chandra connects to the website using contribute. He sees the drafts that he has received in the “Pages Panel” in left.
There are two options appearing for him in Actions in his Contribute Workspace. He chooses to review the draft and puts the draft in review mode by clicking “Review” in “Actions” button in the toolbar. He selects the text that he wants to comment on. A comment dialog appears immediately after he selects the text.
He enters his comments and clicks “OK” to save. The text that is annotated is highlighted and the comments become visible on hovering the highlighted text.
Edit and Deletion of comments is also possible after adding the comments. This can be achieved by single click on the title bar of the comment dialog which appears on hovering
One should also note that Comments can be of two types, Public and Private. Public comments can be seen by everyone i.e. author and reviewers. Private comments can be seen only by author and the reviewer who added that comment. Reviewer is provided a drop down in the comment dialog where he can choose his comment to be private or public.
The first reviewer Chandra adds a private comment and finishes his review by clicking “Review done” in the Actions toolbar. One can choose to perform this actions using the ‘File à Actions’ menu also.
Meanwhile Krishna had connected to the website using Contribute and was unable to see the draft in the pages panel as Chandra was reviewing the same. Krishna sees the draft in his pages panel only after Chandra completes his review. He receives the draft and is able to see all the public comments made by Chandra.
He chooses to review the draft and puts the draft in review mode. He wants to comment on the same text which Chandra commented. He clicks on title bar of Chandra’s comment and adds his comment by clicking on the ‘New’ button
Multiple comments i.e. comments on the same text are stacked like the one above. One should also note that Krishna is unable to see the Private comment added by Chandra. He also completes his review by clicking review done
The author gets back his draft. He is now able to see all the comments provided by the reviewers.
The author edits the drafts to make changes as per the comments. Once he puts the draft in edit mode by clicking the ‘Edit Draft’ button all the comments disappears. Oh!!! How is he going to get the comments to make changes? Do not panic, “Review History” is there for rescue. ‘Review History’ button shows up in the status bar. By clicking ‘Review History’ review history panel opens and shows the complete draft with all the comments. So the author can make the changes to the draft by viewing the comments in review history panel.
Author makes the changes to the draft as per comments and publishes the final draft to the website.
Hence “Annotation mode of review” feature in Contribute makes the review process faster, reliable and more interactive...
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There are few best practices which can be followed for including SWF in your blog posts to make sure that the readers have a good experience.
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WYSIWYG editing of sites managed by DRUPAL!!!!
Adobe Contribute is a WYSIWYG editor which helps the user in creating and managing the website content as well as creating and editing of the blog entries. It supports movable type, Wordpress and Typepad.
As most of you might know, Drupal helps to host sites and also enables the user to edit/view the content using blog editors via blogAPI.
In the following sections, lets see how Contribute can help in WYSIWYG editing of the web content managed by Drupal.
]]> Modules required
Enable the following native modules that come along with the default Installation of Drupal.
Path
Upload
Blog API
Also download and enable the following Drupal modules.
Path auto, Path redirect, Token
Applying Styles from Contribute
Drupal is set to ‘Filtered HTML’ by default and hence does not preserve the styles applied by the user. Enable ‘Full HTML’ option in Administer à Site Configuration à Input Formats Link.
Drupal Configuration
Following section explains the configuration that needs to be done in Drupal.
Contribute works with Drupal when the cleanURL’s are enabled. Enable clean URL in the site configuration settings. In order to enable the same please ensure if mod_rewrite module is enabled in Apache. This can be done by un-commenting the following line in httpd.conf configuration file.
“LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so”
Contribute connects to Drupal using the blog API. Enable the Blog API module available in the module settings and also check the content type (page or story) that can be accessed via Blog API.
URL aliases option appears in the site building settings when path and path auto modules are enabled. Navigate to the automated alias settings and expand the node path settings. Pattern needs to be set for the content path to enable contribute to fetch the entries. Set the pattern for all page and story paths to “blog/1/[nid]”
URL redirects option appears in the site building settings when path redirect module is enabled. Navigate to Add redirect tab, add “http://<server_URL>/blog/1” and “http://<server_URL>” in “From” and “To” fields respectively and save it.
For example,
If the server URL is “http://drupalserver.com” then the “From” and “To” entries are “http://drupalserver.com/blog/1” and “http://drupalserver.com”
For contribute to support upload of files inline or as enclosures the Upload module has to be enabled. Ensure that the user is provided with permissions to upload file. The type of files allowed for uploading is defined in the blogAPI link under Administer à Site configuration.
Once all these settings are in place, Users can use the WYSIWYG contribute CMS for publishing or editing blog entries.
Please click on the below links to watch Captivate movie on Configuring Drupal and Using Contribute to edit Drupal Content. (comment: this will be there in the entry)
Please navigate to the following link to view
]]>You can use Contribute's Office toolbar to apply Dreamweaver templates to your offline data in Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook and publish it to your web site. This article explains about Dreamweaver templates and how to apply Dreamweaver templates to office content and make it part of the web in a very few clicks.
Dreamweaver Templates
A Dreamweaver template contains a preset page layout and includes elements such as text and images. A template gives you a starting point for new web pages and blogs. Using a template can ensure that the pages on your website or blog have a consistent look.
]]> For example, on a company's internal website, the company employee template might contain basic elements and provide sections for employee information. Suppose the template has the company logo and address, and blank sections for the employee's name, department, phone number, and picture. Any new employee page based on the company employee template inherits the same page layout.
In a template, the designer creates regions to control which elements of a template-based page you can edit. There are editable regions in a template, which you can edit, and locked regions, which you can't edit. In the employee template example, the company logo and address might be in a locked region. The employee information sections would be editable regions. The locked and editable regions in a sample template's page are shown in the figure below.
In Contribute you can create a page using the Dreamweaver template and put the content in editable regions and publish without bothering about the rest of the area of the page. The published page will look consistent with other pages in the website.
How can you apply Dreamweaver templates to office content and make it part of the web?
Contribute has small and very simple toolbar that gets added to Microsoft Word, Excel and outlook’s toolbar ribbon after contribute installation. The toolbar has three functional buttons as shown below.
You can either open the office content in Contribute for further editing or directly publish to the website using any one of the available formats.
Opening office content in Contribute
If you want to perform further formatting or editing inside Contribute, you can click on the ‘Open in Contribute’ button in the toolbar. Then contribute toolbar will launch contribute and brings up the following ‘Site Selection’ dialog. This dialog allows you to select the website where you want to publish the office content and also it allows you to apply dreamweaver templates to your office content. You can also create a connection to website if there is no connection established to the website already.
After selecting the website, clicking on ‘Choose Template’ button will bring up following ‘Choose Template’ dialog.
In the above ‘Choose Template’ dialog, you can select the template you want to apply and editable region where you want to place your office content. Then on clicking OK, Contribute will create a new webpage using the selected template and inserts the office content in the selected editable region. Then you can either modify or format the content in the editable region inside Contribute or publish to website. Now the published page will have all formatting which was defined in the template and content in one of the selected editable region and page looks like professional web page.
Publishing Office content to website directly
The office content can also be published to website directly. On clicking ‘Publish To Web’ button in the toolbar will bring up the following ‘Publish To Web’ dialog.
In this dialog you can select to website to publish your office content, also the target format of the office content. If you select .doc(x)/.xls(x) or .pdf, the office content will be published in selected format to ‘documents’ folder within site.
If you select the .html format, then you can apply dreamweaver template to office content and publish. The published page will have all formatting defined in the template and the office content inside the selected editable region. On clicking ‘Choose Template’ button will bring up the ‘Choose Template’ dialog that allows you to select the template you wish to apply and the editable region you want place the office content.
Here is the video demo of the complete workflow
Contribute allows users to add media contents like PDF ; Flash (swf & Video) ; Images in a web page.
Contribute also renders these media objects during editing, giving a WYSIWYG edit experience. While in Browse mode, the Contribute's workspace is of course just an embedded browser – Safari & IE on Mac and Windows respectively. Let’s talk about rendering in browse mode separately, since it’s a different arena.
Is this a boon or a bane? When everything is fine, all are very happy.
Everything fine?
Contribute uses plugins to render the media files in Edit mode. Whenever there is an update/release in any of these dependent components then there might be issues ranging from minor to major ones.
]]> Example –Yes, the Acrobat plugin that comes with Acrobat Reader is used in rendering the PDF files.
So, when a new version of Reader is released, there may be conflicts in the dynamic libraries of Contribute on rendering the inserted pdf file. (ref screenshot below).
So, How to overcome these issues of updates / releases harming Contribute's flow / functioning?
Simple, open Contribute's Application folder and then go to “Configuration” – “Plugins” (for Windows OS) and “Plug-ins” (for Mac OS)- folder and open the file "UnsupportedPlugins.txt". Add the name of the plugin used for rendering the media file in this unsupported list.
For the mentioned PDF example add the text "nppdf32.dll" in “UnsupportedPlugins.txt” file , then save the file and close it.
Launch Contribute and add PDF files and publish. Observe that the PDF files are not rendered in edit mode and the WebPages are published successfully.
Similarly Flash rendering can be blocked in edit mode by adding “npswf32.dll” in the same "UnsupportedPlugins.txt" file.
The dll’s names are added one below the other and saved.
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Do you know that data loss can be prevented using the Auto save feature in Contribute?
Users don’t have to worry about the data loss due to any unexpected events. Users can define the preferences once and stop worrying thereafter.
Just define the auto save frequency up to as low as 1 minute and save your time of rewriting the content in the case of unexpected crash
Auto save feature in Contribute saves the drafts at specified time intervals.
Following steps explains how to enable Auto save:
1. Launch Contribute Application
2. Go to File -> Preferences (Contribute -> Preferences in MAC).
3. Go to the second option "Editing" in the left panel
4. Enable Auto save and set the time between the ranges of 1 – 120 (minutes).
5. Contribute saves the draft at specified time intervals.
Click on the below image to view flash movie on "Enabling Auto save in Contribute"
Easy way to manage your web sites :
Web sites are increasingly having content from XML files and Databases apart from the traditional HTML files and associated static files. Design of websites is moving from being static sites with rich content to dynamic sites with rich content. This makes it harder for websites to be maintained and updated by using traditional tools. Tools need to be capable enough to connect to data/content in different forms and different sources and allow editing of content by the Content Contributor. In the absence of such tools, Content Contributor needs to understand complex tools and follow complex processes to get the content edited.
A content management system allows authoring, aggregating, updating, maintaining and serving of content to end users. The content management systems can vary very broadly in terms of functionality. Analytics and storage are equally important components of a content management system. Authoring and Editing components are used by Content Contributors along with Web professionals to contribute content to the web site and also to keep the web site updated. While Analytics/Storage and such capabilities are needed by Web Administrators to ensure efficient management of the web site and make sure the web site is fresh and easily recover from any errors in the processes.
Three major sub systems of a Content Management System : Content creation, Content storage, Content Delivery. Content Creation sub system provides modules and tools to author Content. WYSIWYG components make it easier for the content authors to visualize the web site design and the look and feel of the content. Content storage sub system deals with the way the content is stored and retrieved. This sub system provides versioning support and ability to manage the web site storage. Content delivery systems provide capability to serve content on demand to the end users.
What does a SWCMS mean?
Simple can be applicable in different ways – overall I look at it as a low TCO product which helps in creation/maintaining and distribution of content.
Simple to install, simple to create/author/aggregate content, simple to publish content.
Simple to install – many times the content is from subject matter experts who would like to work with the tools they usually use and comfortable with but make sure that the latest information is provided to everyone.
Simple to acquire content
Make it simple for administrators to manage users and delegate permissions to update the content making sure that the content contributors cannot affect the structure and design of the site.
How about the capabilities – any content management system needs to provide the basic functionality to acquire/modify/publish content variety of content.
Is Contribute a content management system?
Contribute in simple terms is a very easy to use WYSIWYG HTML editor for Content Contributors. Contribute allows users to author the web content. Contribute is rich in terms of aggregation capability. The Contribute users can aggregate content varying from text documents to images to rich media content. Contribute strongly leverages native editors for the corresponding content. It has certain functionality lacking as of now. The content exists in variety of forms. Although majority of content is still available on a file system, there is availability of content in Databases. Contribute cannot handle the content inside databases well as of now. Contribute along with Contribute publishing server will help manage web sites easily.
Add more visibility to your blog – Tagging and Trackbacks
Tagging:
Tagging is a new phenomenon started by del.icio.us and Flickr several years ago, and accelerated by Technorati and IceRocket. Tags are like categories or keywords, but are different in at least two ways:
Adding tags using Contribute is very simple. When the user enters a tag in the tag field for a blog entry, Contribute creates a tag link along with providing you the WYSIWYG editing experience of the blog entry. After the user publishes the entry and clicks the tag link, a list appears in the embedded browser showing all the blog entries indexed by the tag repository using the same tag.
When you create or edit a blog entry in the Pages panel, you can enter as many tags as you want for the entry, separated by commas.
In Contribute you can control the placement of the tags in your blog entry, and allow you to label tags with prefix. Also you can specify your tag repositories and set your default tag repository.
Trackbacks:
Trackback URLs are used to maintain a list of other blogs that are linked to your blog entry. To link to one of your blog entries, other blog authors add that blog entry’s trackback URLs to their blog entry. Your blog maintains a record of these linked blog entries for each of your blog entries. When you create a blog entry, you can add one or more trackback URLs to it. Also you can prevent other users from adding your blog’s trackback URL to their blog entries by disabling the Allow Trackback option in the Contribute toolbar.
You can set preference to determine whether trackback is enabled for blog entries. Some blogs don’t support the trackback feature or require you to set a preference to allow it.
Once you allow track back and publish the entry, it will display the trackback URL for tracking.
You can add this trackback URL to you entry, by clicking “Trackbacks” button in the Contribute toolbar or through Insert-->Trackbacks menu.
Which will through an dialog for adding trackbacks URL. Enter the trackback URL for the blog entry in the Trackback URL(s) field, and then click OK.
Contribute adds the URLs to the blog entry, and the Trackbacks field appears at the bottom of the Contribute workspace. You can add, edit, or delete trackback URLs in this field. These modifications are also reflected in the Trackbacks dialog box.
Publish the entry. It might be required to go to the typepad account for approval of trackbacks.
Post To Blog feature in Contribute
Post To Blog operation can be done through, browsers (IE and Firefox), Word, Excel and Outlook.
How does Post To Blog work with browsers?
If you come across some great stuff in a site while browsing, and wants to blog about it. Make a selection in the browser, and then clicks on the "Post to Blog " button in the browser toolbar.
If no blog connection is already defined in Contribute, Contribute is launched which then gives her an option of making a new blog connection. After making the connection, Contribute opens up a new blog entry, containing the text that had selected. Then add your contents to the blog entry and publishes the blog.
How does Post To Blog work with office documents?
If you love to blog on technical documents and come across a great document and want to blog on it. Simply makes the selection on the word/Excel/Outlook, and then clicks on the "Post to Blog" button or the menu Contribute -> Post To Blog.
If already connection exists, then Contribute launches with a connection to the blog site and creates a new blog entry in the default blog site mentioned in the preference. If no blog connection is already defined in Contribute, Contribute is launched which then gives her an option of making a new blog connection.
Editing a live web page\blog entry by just a click of a button in a browser.
This can be achieved using the latest version of Contribute i.e. Contribute CS4.
Contribute In Browser Editor provides you the capability to edit a web page\blog entry from a browser by just clicking "Edit" button of Contribute toolbar, the whole browser transforms into a powerful WYSIWYG editing experience.
What you see is truly what you get, including where images, pdf and other multimedia are placed and user can insert/delete links, tables, images, pdf, swf, videos, modify page properties and publish the changes by just clicking a publish button like you do from powerful Contribute Desktop client.
The only requirement is to have the installation of the Contribute in the same machine but the ability to edit a page inside the browser makes content updating quick and simple.
The browsers supported includes Firefox 2 and 3 on Windows and Mac and Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 on Windows.
Adobe Contribute Contribute Publishing Server
