Adobe Contribute

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

Contribute,WYSIWYG editing

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.

Contribute

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:

• Go to Edit > Administer Websites and select a website.
• Administer Website dialog box comes up.
• Select Compatibility from the list on the left.

Tags: Contribute,RSS Aggregators

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.

Contribute,WYSIWYG,HTML Snippet,Google Analytics

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.

Review,Annotation,Contribute,comments

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

Contribute,blog

Best practices for including SWF in your blog posts while posting from Contribute

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.

• Do not auto-play the SWF file(s) as there’s nothing worse than going to a blog, which includes multiple posts with SWF files in them and have them all auto-play at the same time. Users encountering this issue and are unlikely to come back on the same blog again.

WYSIWYG,Drupal,Contribute

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.

Contribute,Dreamweaver,Templates

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.

Contribute,WYSIWYG,Rendering Rich Media Content

How to stop contribute from rendering Rich Media Content in Edit Mode?

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.   

Auto Save,data loss,Contribute

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"

    Adobe Contribute  Contribute Publishing Server 

Contribute,WYSIWYG,HTML Editor,WCMS,Web Content Management

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.

    Adobe Contribute  Contribute Publishing Server  

Contribute,WYSIWYG,Tagging,Trackbacks

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:

• Tags are visible and actionable by readers.  Categories and Keywords are often hidden from view, so users hardly ever "use" them
• Tags are bottom-up information architecture.   Categories have to be defined before being used, and because so few users enter Keywords, search engines can't made good use of them.  For many systems, Tags can also be added by readers as well, so that IA grows organically as numerous readers add their own organization to content.

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.

   Adobe Contribute  Contribute Publishing Server       

Contribute,Post To Blog

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.

    Adobe Contribute  Contribute Publishing Server   

Contribute,WYSIWYG,HTML Editor,WCMS,Web Content Management

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