Adobe Contribute CS4
Buy Adobe Contribute CS3
Price: $50
Contribute is a great tool for its audience. It is perfect for the content owner or small business owner who doesn't want to spend a lot of time managing or maintaining a website. With Contribute you don't need to know HTML or CSS, you just open your website, browse to the page that you want to edit and make your changes. Since it's a WYSIWYG editor and Web browser in one, you know how your changes will look as you're editing them. The reason I gave Contribute three stars is because it's not well suited to most Web designers as their primary Web editor. It doesn't support CSS or HTML code directly, so you have to rely on the styles and classes already defined for the website. Two of the best features of Contribute are the version controls and access controls built into the program. When you set up a site to be edited by Contribute users, you are setting up a whole system to manage that site as well. The site administrator can create roles and access levels for different people. And the version control system, with check-in and check-out as well as rollback capability means that you never have to worry about mistakes taking down entire pages. Finally, Contribute acts as a full-featured blog editor. If you're a Web designer who also writes a blog, you can use Dreamweaver to build your sites with Contribute access. Then you just provide your content owners with Contribute roles so that they can edit the pages. And you can use Contribute to administer the site and manage your blog.
Adobe Contribute CS4 ($199 street; upgrade, $99) does one job and does it brilliantly: It lets you and your colleagues edit a Web site that's already online, using a WYSIWYG interface that makes the process effortless. If you're an individual Web designer, you can use this unique app to touch up your sites when you're on the road and don't have access to the source files. If you manage a large Web site, you can give access to your colleagues but restrict them to editing only specified parts of individual pages. Or you can let them create entirely new pages. Contribute also provides a simple, powerful interface for editing your blogs and stores your blog passwords so you don't have to log in manually every time you want to correct a misspelling in an entry.
Contribute CS4 is part of the Web Premium, Web Standard and Master Collection editions of Adobe Creative Suite 4. The biggest change to Adobe Contribute CS4 is a new workflow process that allows the site administrator to require pages based on a particular site template to go through review and approval before they can be published. You can now edit pages using Adobe Contribute CS4's tools from within Firefox (but not Safari). Time-sensitive pages can now be set to expire, notifying the author that they need refreshing. Better CSS support and tighter integration with Dreamweaver, as well as a cosmetic facelift (gaining the Adobe application look and feel) round out a mediocre upgrade.