Macromedia Contribute 3.0 Win/Mac

by Macromedia

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0002OQY0O
• Item model number: CTD030D000
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 29, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,045 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #8 in Software > Web Development > Professional Development
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good at what it is ment for, February 6, 2005

By 

ksuwildkat "ksuwildkat" (Monterey, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Macromedia Contribute 3.0 Win/Mac (CD-ROM)

I have a hard time recommending or discouraging buying Contribute without explaining what it is both good and bad at.

To start with, this is NOT a program for building web pages from scratch. If you need to truly build a web page, use Dreamweaver MX. On the other hand, if you want to maintain a pre-built site or make a site out of the many professionally designed templates provided, Contribute is an excellent tool.

I purchased Contribute when I was contracted by a local company to build a web page and give them the ability to perform daily updates without deep technical skills. I had originally planned to build and deploy the site with Contribute to ensure that the owners of the site would have no difficulties in the future. I quickly ran into the many limitations of Contribute.

First off, the actual HTML is completely hidden. There is no way to directly edit the code from within Contribute. You can use an external editor but there is no way to see your changes live without going though a save, exit external editing, look, return to external editing sequence. While I consider this an omission, this is a feature for most of Contributes target audience because it's easy to really mess things up in HTML if you don't know what you are doing.

The second omission can only be described as a flaw. Within the design portion, there is no way to perform a "Save As" of your page. Once you have made changes to a page you have only two options - Publish and Save as Draft. Publish overwrites the previous version and Save as Draft prevents changes to the page until the draft is published. The end result is that you cannot make multiple copies of a page to use as a template, you can't test how something works without being destructive and you can't save older versions for historical purposes. This flaw is compounded by Contribute saving your files under a series of folders with a naming convention understood only by the creators of the program. These flaws alone prevent me from giving Contribute more than 3 stars.

On the positive side, Contribute has some very powerful tools that are implemented in a very novice friendly way. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript additions, eBay site building, Google Search and PayPal payment boxes are a mouse click away. The Windows version includes a powerful FlashPaper2 utility that makes documents web friendly and the Mac version is tightly integrated with Apples .Mac service.

Where Contribute really shines is in editing an existing site that has a full administrator using Dreamweaver. The Publish and Draft functions are tied into Administrator, Publisher and Editor roles to ensure that what is on a site is what should be there. For an office that has many parts that need to add to a site, Contribute is ideal. For a small company wanting to get on the web fast or an eBay seller wanting to go beyond the default, Contribute is more than enough. Beyond that, move up to Dreamweaver.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Makes a difficult process easy, February 26, 2005

By 

GC0110 (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Macromedia Contribute 3.0 Win/Mac (CD-ROM)

I know nothing about web design, and don't really want to do it myself. But, I was interested in being able to update one particular page, created by a professional, on my own, and save myself some $$ in the process. I tried two other programs, and got nowhere with them. Contribute 3 was my third attempt, and made it possible to make the modifications with virtually no hassle. My first updates were accomplished in about 5 minutes, and my subsequent ones have taken perhaps 30 seconds.

I have not explored all the bells and whistles of the program yet. But, at least for my simple needs the program works very well, and is easy to use. For that I'm thankful and grateful.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, February 10, 2005

By 

Chris Tingom "[e-mail]" (Scottsdale, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Macromedia Contribute 3.0 Win/Mac (CD-ROM)

Contribute works great for allowing non-web people to edit their web sites. Highly recommended. Works best in tandem with Dreamweaver and in particular sites set up using the Dreamweaver Template system.