Trialing Contribute 4
I’ve been trying out Adobe’s (Macromedia’s) Contribute 4, there’s a 30 day trial for download. I’m doing this because I’m interested in the new CS3 version but it’s not available yet. So, I’ve plumbed for a test of version 4 in the meantime as several reports say there’s not a huge functional difference between the two versions. Only time will tell how major the update really is.
Unfortunately, I’m undecided how good it is. This product costs about £100 and can’t match the flexibility of Ecto (which is far cheaper @ £10) when it comes to some respects of writing blog entries.
Contribute has a bug which means it won’t load an image if there is a slash in the filename or any of the folders above it. I use YEAR/MONTH designations in my blog image source folders. So they’ll be a folder with something like “2004/04″ in the path to the image file. Ecto has no problem with this but if you try it with Contribute 4 then it completely fails to find the image.
Categories are equally badly implemented. Ecto allows the correct use of these, you can assign one, none or as many as you want if a posting crosses several categories. However, Contribute 4 will only allow the tagging of one category and it appears (from the documentation) that they are aware this is a limitation because they state “…you can only apply one category…” It sounds like a lot of people have asked for it.
The keyboard shortcuts are also PC based. They are annoyingly inconsistent with other standard Mac applications. For example, getting to the start and end of lines. Ecto also has as-you-type spell checking, Contribute 4 does not.
What I do like is that Contribute presents the posting as it will appear on the blog, with correct fonts, banner, CSS, etc. Unfortunately, nice though this is it doesn’t make up for the serious lack of functionality and usability of the blog aspects of the program.
On the plus side, the editor does handles lists very well. This is something which Ecto has huge problems with. If you try to edit them in Ecto it goes badly wrong at times and you have to hand-edit the HTML source. Despite trying to break it in Contribute, the editor retained control over the formatting.
Also editing entries that already exist on the blog is lovely in Contribute. You simply use the built-in browser to find the entry you want to change and press the ‘Edit’ button. You have to have setup the blog to be managed by Contribute obviously. Once that’s done you just have a short wait and hey-presto you can edit the posting to your hearts content. A very nice feature. In Ecto you can only edit posts you’ve made within the package.
Contributes ability to do the same thing with the general content and pages of your website is equally impressive. Again, you need to set it up first. If you then need to add a new page you can simply create it using the current page as a template, a predefined template or one of your sites templates (I assume you need Dreamweaver templates for this). Existing pages can be modified to add links to the new page. It’s a very nice system and give you a kind of web-word-processor.
Contribute also scores over Ecto in it’s ability to edit the images in posted blog entries. Ecto just won’t let you do this. If you change it in Contribute it does upload a new file (and not remove the old one - it could be in use elsewhere) but at least it can be done. With Ecto the only way to change a file is to upload a new version via an FTP client and overwrite the old one. You could hand-edit the HTML in the posting in Ecto to point to a new file and you would also have to do this to change the dimensions of a new image. The whole point of a blog editor is to stop you having to hand code HTML though.
There were other issues with Contribute. I had problems connecting to one of my hosting services for web editing. In the end I was forced to give up and use another host. That said, the particular hosting service in question - despite claiming differently - is rather restrictive in their server set-up and access. It may be worth checking that Contribute is compatible with your hosting service before using it.
Hopefully, Contribute CS3 will address the problems with image filenames and categories because I find Ecto annoying in some respects. I would like to find a better program for doing my entries and if it would also allow me to update the rest of the website easily - like adding new articles - then that would be a massive advantage. Ecto 3 will, perhaps, address my blogging issues but I don’t think it’s going to allow the update to the rest of the website in the way Contribute does. It’s also taking an very long time to come to market.
I’ll run some testing when a trial of Contribute CS3 is made available. In the end I could work around the Contribute issues. It’s simple to rename my blog image folders and using the built-in browser I could update the categories for the blog entries. This would be painful but it might be worthwhile to gain the other advantages Contribute has to offer.
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