Edit content in Dreamweaver sites using Contribute

Adobe® Contribute® CS4 combines a web browser with a web-page editor. It enables your colleagues or clients to browse to a page in a site that you created, and to edit or update the page if they have permission to do so. Contribute users can add and update basic web content, including formatted text, images, tables, and links. Contribute site administrators can limit what ordinary (non-administrator) users can do in a site.

As the site administrator, you give non-administrators the ability to edit pages by creating a connection key and sending it to them (for information on how to do this, see Contribute Help. You can also set up a connection to a Contribute site using Dreamweaver, which lets you or your site designer connect to the Contribute site and use all of the editing capabilities available in Dreamweaver.

Contribute adds functionality to your website with Contribute Publishing Server (CPS), a suite of publishing applications and user management tools that lets you integrate Contribute with your organization’s user directory service—for example, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Active Directory. When you enable your Dreamweaver site as a Contribute site, Dreamweaver reads Contribute’s administration settings whenever you connect to the remote site. If Dreamweaver detects that CPS is enabled, it inherits some of the functionality of CPS, such as file rollback and event logging.

You can use Dreamweaver to connect to and modify a file in a Contribute site. Most Dreamweaver capabilities work the same way with a Contribute site as they do with any other site. However, when you use Dreamweaver with a Contribute site, Dreamweaver automatically performs certain file-management operations, such as saving multiple revisions of a document, and logging certain events in the CPS Console.

For more information, see Contribute Help.

Site structure and page design for a Contribute site

To enable Contribute users to edit your website, keep the following points in mind when you structure it:

• Keep your site structure simple. Don’t nest folders too deeply. Group related items together in a folder.

• Set up appropriate read and write permissions for folders on the server.

• Add index pages to folders as you create them, to encourage Contribute users to place new pages in the correct folders. For example, if Contribute users provide pages containing meeting minutes, create a folder in the site root folder named meeting_minutes, and create an index page in that folder. Then provide a link from your site’s main page to the index page for meeting minutes. A Contribute user can then navigate to that index page and create a new page of minutes for a specific meeting, linked from that page.

• On each folder’s index page, provide a list of links to the individual content pages and documents in that folder.

• Keep page designs as simple as possible, minimizing fancy formatting.

• Use CSS rather than HTML tags and name your CSS styles clearly. If the Contribute users use a standard set of styles in Microsoft Word, use the same names for the CSS styles, so that Contribute can map the styles when a user copies information from a Word document and pastes it into a Contribute page.

• To prevent a CSS style from being available to Contribute users, change the name of the style so that the name starts with mmhide_. For example, if you use a style named RightJustified in a page but you don’t want Contribute users to be able to use that style, rename the style to mmhide_RightJustified.

• Use as few CSS styles as possible, to keep things simple and clean.
• If you use server-side includes for HTML page elements, such as headers or footers, create an unlinked HTML page that contains links to the include files. Contribute users can then bookmark that page and use it to navigate to the include files and edit them.

File transfer to and from a Contribute site

Contribute uses a system much like the Dreamweaver Check In/Check Out system to ensure that only one user at a time can edit a given web page. When you enable Contribute compatibility in Dreamweaver, the Dreamweaver Check In/Check Out system is automatically enabled.

To transfer files to and from a Contribute site using Dreamweaver, always use the Check In and Check Out commands. If you instead use the PUT and GET commands to transfer files, you might overwrite the modifications that a Contribute user has recently made to a file.

When you check a file in to a Contribute site, Dreamweaver makes a backup copy of the previous checked-in version of the file in the _baks folder and adds your user name and a date stamp to a Design Notes file.

Contribute file and folder permissions on the server

Contribute provides a way to manage file and folder permissions for each user role you define; however, Contribute doesn’t provide a way to manage the underlying read and write permissions assigned to files and folders by the server. In Dreamweaver, you can manage those permissions directly on the server.

If a Contribute user doesn’t have read access on the server to a dependent file, such as an image displayed in a page, the contents of the dependent file don’t appear in the Contribute window. For example, if a user doesn’t have read access to an images folder, the images in that folder appear as broken image icons in Contribute. Similarly, Dreamweaver templates are stored in a subfolder of the site’s root folder, so if a Contribute user doesn’t have read access to the root folder, they can’t use templates in that site unless you copy the templates to an appropriate folder.

When you set up a Dreamweaver site, you must give users read access on the server to the /_mm folder (the _mm subfolder of the root folder), the /Templates folder, and all of the folders containing assets that they will need to use.

If, for security reasons, you can’t give users read access to the /Templates folder, you can still enable Contribute users to access  templates. See Enable Contribute users to access templates without root folder access.

For more information about Contribute permissions, see Administering Contribute in Contribute Help.

Contribute special files

Contribute uses a variety of special files that aren’t intended to be viewed by visitors to your site:

• The shared settings file, which has an obfuscated filename with a CSI extension, appears in a folder named _mm in the root folder of the site, and contains information that Contribute uses to manage the site

• Older versions of files, in folders named _baks

• Temporary versions of pages, so that users can preview changes

• Temporary lock files, indicating that a given page is being edited or previewed

• Design Notes files containing metadata about the site’s pages

  In general, you shouldn’t edit any of these Contribute special files using Dreamweaver; Dreamweaver manages them automatically.

  If you don’t want these Contribute special files to appear on your publicly accessible server, you can set up a staging server where Contribute users work on pages. Then periodically copy those web pages from the staging server to a production server that’s on the web. If you take this staging-server approach, copy only web pages to the production server, not any of the above-listed Contribute special files. In particular, don’t copy the _mm and _baks folders to the production server.

Occasionally you might need to manually delete Contribute special files. For example, there might be circumstances in which Contribute fails to delete temporary preview pages when the user is finished previewing; in that case, you would have to manually delete those temporary pages. Temporary preview pages have filenames that begin with TMP.

Similarly, under some circumstances an outdated lock file may be accidentally left on the server. If that happens, you must manually delete the lock file to allow others to edit the page.

Prepare a site for use with Contribute

If you’re preparing an existing Dreamweaver site for Contribute users, you need to explicitly enable Contribute compatibility to use Contribute-related features; Dreamweaver does not prompt you to do this; however, when you connect to a site that’s been set up as a Contribute site (that has an administrator), Dreamweaver prompts you to enable Contribute compatibility.

Not all connection types support Contribute compatibility. The following restrictions apply to connection types:

• If your remote site connection uses WebDAV, you can’t enable Contribute compatibility, because those source-control systems aren’t compatible with the Design Notes and Check In/Check Out systems that Dreamweaver uses for Contribute sites.

• If you use RDS to connect to your remote site, you can enable Contribute compatibility, but you must customize your connection before you can share it with Contribute users.

• If you’re using your local computer as a web server, you must set up the site using an FTP or network connection to your computer (rather than just a local folder path) to be able to share your connection with Contribute users.

When you enable Contribute compatibility, Dreamweaver automatically enables Design Notes (including the Upload Design Notes For Sharing option) and the Check In/Check Out system.

If Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) is enabled on the remote site you are connecting to, Dreamweaver notifies the CPS every time you trigger a network operation such as checking in, rolling back, or publishing a file. The CPS will log these events, and you can view the log in the CPS Administration Console. (If you disable CPS, these events are not logged.) You enable CPS using Contribute. For more information, see Adobe Contribute Help.

Administer a Contribute site using Dreamweaver

After you enable Contribute compatibility, you can use Dreamweaver to start Contribute to perform site administration tasks.

As an administrator of a Contribute site, you can:

• Change the administrative settings for the site.

  Contribute administrative settings are a collection of settings that apply to all users of your website. These settings enable you to fine-tune Contribute to provide a better user experience.

• Change the permissions granted to user roles in Contribute.

• Set up Contribute users.

  Contribute users need certain information about the site to be able to connect to it. You can package all of this information in a file called a connection key to send to Contribute users.

For more information about administrative settings, managing user roles, or creating a connection key, see Contribute Help.

Delete, move, or rename a remote file in a Contribute site

Deleting a file from the remote server that hosts a Contribute site works much like deleting a file from the server for any Dreamweaver site. However, when you delete a file from a Contribute site, Dreamweaver asks whether to delete all older versions of the file. If you choose to keep the older versions, Dreamweaver saves a copy of the current version in the _baks folder so you can restore it later.

Renaming a remote file or moving it from one folder to another in a Contribute site works the same way it works in any Dreamweaver site. In a Contribute site, Dreamweaver also renames or moves the associated previous versions of the file that are saved in the _baks folder.

Enable Contribute users to access templates without root folder access

In a Contribute site, you manage underlying file and folder permissions directly on the server. If, for security reasons, you can’t give users read access to the /Templates folder, you can still make the templates available to users.

Troubleshoot a Contribute site

If a remote file in a Contribute site appears to be checked out, but the file isn’t actually locked on the user’s computer, you can unlock the file to enable users to edit it.

When you click any button related to Contribute site administration, Dreamweaver verifies that it can connect to your remote site and that the Site Root URL you’ve given for the site is valid. If Dreamweaver can’t connect, or if the URL isn’t valid, an error message appears.

If the administration tools aren’t working properly, there might be something wrong with the _mm folder.

Unlock a file in a Contribute site

Troubleshoot connection problems for a Contribute site

Troubleshoot Contribute administration tools