Adobe Contribute Is Slick: GBGLawOffice.com Experience

However, last year, my good friend from college, his dad, and his dad's law partner broke away from their old law firm and started up their own firm. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that they were looking for a very basic web presence (contact info, profiles, legal briefs, etc.). He and I go back a bit and I know that their decision to break away from their well-established firm was a big decision (and one for which I have a tremendous amount of respect), so I agreed to help set up their web site and e-mail addresses. I knew from the beginning that any sort of scripting language was unnecessary for what they wanted to display, but I also had to keep in mind that they ultimately wanted to take control of the site and update it without the need for me to do it. I set up their account with GoDaddy.com, including registering the domain name. The plan that I selected (this was before they offered ColdFusion) had ASP support, so I was tempted to build them a rudimentary document publishing system. Then it hit me -- doesn't Adobe Contribute do what I want? It turns out that it's an emphatic YES!!

Contribute has been around for a while and I admittedly never gave it more than a cursory look because it doesn't fit in with any of my company's needs. So I went to the Contribute Developer Center to get a feel for how to do certain things and off I went. I realized after doing a couple of pages that my life was going to be immensely easier if I used Dreamweaver Templates for the layout. Luckily, Contribute and Dreamweaver play nice together. There are some quirks to the integration of the two that I'd like to see worked out (you need to totally close and re-open the site in Contribute for the Template changes to take effect, and even that didn't always work), but it did make my change management life infinitely easier.

Overall, I'm extremely happy with Contribute. Here (briefly) are my likes and dis-likes with my experience with it:

Likes

• Mind-numbingly easy for non-techies to manage their web site. I don't have to be "on call" to update the site when they want to publish a new Word document or PDF.
• Administration is a snap. A very intuitive wizard walks you through the process of creating a connection key for the various editors, including the ability to assign Roles so that a particular user doesn't overstep their bounds.
• My friend can edit a page and create links (and do everything that I would normally do) with a simple click of a button in the Contribute IDE. Kudos to the designers of the IDE, as it's extremely intuitive for technical and non-technical people alike.
• I specifically received a request to provide search integration with Google. There is a very cool wizard integrated into the IDE in which you just answer a few questions and it generates all the Google integration code for you. (It also has a wizard for PayPal integration, but I didn't need that.)

Dislikes

• I don't entirely like that you're essentially editing your live site. (You bring a live page into "Edit" mode, which is just a copy of the live page in a hidden sub-directory, and then publish it directly back out), but I think that's more because I'm so used to having source control with a staging environment.
• There are a bunch of subdirectories created that Contribute uses to do its job (i.e., the editing features just mentioned). The robots.txt file that is auto-generated does ask the search engines not to index them, but the search engines don't necessarily have to follow the robots.txt directives either. Plus, you can just view the robots.txt file and manually get into the directories if you wanted too.
• Getting Contribute to recognize changes to my Dreamweaver Templates is a bit more of a process than it needs to be. I pretty much wound up just restarting the IDE to get it to recognize the changes.

Overall, I highly recommend the cost of the license if you're doing this sort of one-off work. The amount of maintenance time you'll save down the road by being able to transfer the power of web site management to your client is tremendous. Plus, it allows them to make any and all tweaks they wish to make without them needing to contact you.

If you're interested in viewing the final site, it can be found at www.gbglawoffice.com. Thanks Macromedia now Adobe!