Macromedia Contribute

I’ve spent a bit of time playing with Macromedia’s new product offering, Contribute. Contribute is a nicely designed desktop app that lets non-technical users update website content.

Although it does make updating sites easy for average users, I think Contribute has some limitations that may hinder its general uptake. First, it’s really designed to update static sites, not dynamic ones. Second, you can only connect to sites using FTP or your LAN (SCP would be a terrific addition here). Third, although you can apparently use it on sites created with Frontpage or other apps, it has the tightest integration with sites made with Dreamweaver MX.

In a lot of ways it seems like MM is targetting designers who use DWMX and providing them with the means to deploy a site within an organisation without needing to dig into any backend environments. I just have to wonder if this product wouldn’t have made more of a splash a couple of years ago; surely the market for it is shrinking.

One of the nicest features of Contribute though is the drag and drop for Word and Excel files. Drag the file into the content area and there it is in the page. The power of the desktop executable really got me thinking about different ways to provide an interface for content administrators. Imagine a desktop app that functioned like Contribute, but which hooked into any dynamic CMS via an API that developers themselves could implement when they built their site. Developers would save time writing their CMS because they needn’t worry about an admin interface, and content admins would be happy to abandon buggy DHTML editors and other inconsistant interfaces created by developers who don’t always clearly understand their needs. The whole thing could run over the http port to boot. Now an application like that would make an impact on content management.

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