Friday, June 29, 2007

Contribute

With a wedding to attend tomorrow, family down, and the simple fact that this is the Canada Day long weekend, I doubt I will be posting again until Tuesday night. That being said, I should probably finish off my look at the Macromedia Studio 8 programs that transitioned over to the Creative Suite 3 Web Basic edition. Obviously, the premium edition contains everything that is in the basic version.

Contribute can be thought of as Dreamweaver lite. I don't find it that useful as I have access to Dreamweaver so why would I use the lite version? The purpose behind Contribute is to allow anyone the ability to easily make changes to a site. It is sort of like a content management system for sites that aren't built on top of content management software such as the freely available Drupal. Once the site design is done, non-site designers can be given Contribute and can then make changes to the content themselves.

One of the big features about Contribute CS3 is the blog support. It even supports blogger. I haven't tried this myself, as I tend to edit my blog on my mac. Adobe will not let you switch operating systems when you upgrade a product, even though I would love to switch to the Mac version. Besides, for a blog as simple as this one, the built in editing tools that blogger supplies are more than adequate.

I still have not entirely figured out why Contribute is included in the suite when Dreamweaver is already in the suite, but then again the premium version has both Photoshop and Fireworks in it. It is such a minor product that I don't think it will factor in to anyones upgrade decision.

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