Just a suggestion: Could it be your client used Word to create his contents and used just the Contribute toolbar button?

I am not quite sure how Contribute and Word integrate, but my experience with Word and HTML is that they don’t go together well. Copying over text from Word - i.e. from an article written in the word processor - to a Web site design tool will almost inevitably lead to problems just like you describe.

Hi Dierk and thanks for the comment!

Yeah, I know what you mean. What with the not-so-SmartQuotes thing, I’ve seen that before myself.

Even if that was the case, it doesn’t account for the fact that Adobe Contribute adds in entirely new blocks of CSS into the header and applies them to previously styled elements.

It’s deeply frustrating, as you can imagine…

Admittedly I just stumbled upon contribute, am not an expert on it.

On Adobe’s CS3 promo workshop site [http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/] I just saw a video under Contribute->Accessibility called ‘Administering a website’ by Mark Fletcher. He quickly goes through setting up a Role - essentially the same as a group in CMS - with permissions of what users can change.

If I am not mistaken there is an option on what users in a specific role are allowed to change on a file basis; it seems one can forbid to add, modify and delete file types, like CSS [by extension I presume internal as well].

Can it be that your client was assigned to a rather powerful tole, say Administrator, with authorisation to change just these vital files?

Hi Dierk, and thanks for returning.

Yes, there are various roles, and the client needs to have an Administrator role, while the other staff from around the world have lesser roles.

All the client does is edit text and add in images.

She knows nothing of CSS. But my point is, Adobe Contribute should not only preserve the styles present in the web pages, but make use of them.

This is patently not the case. Adobe Contribute routinely makes such a total mess of things that web pages are effectively not fit to be used in my projects any longer, and need to be re-written…

Right, thanks to you since your story is very helpful for my evaluation of Contribute!

What I find most disappointing about this whole thing is that Adobe have inherited the ills of Macromedia, who were renown for their poor quality, quirky products.

What I find so dismaying is that Adobe seem to have done nothing to bring Adobe Contribute up to their own high standards.

Even worse, I can’t find anything out there that directly competes with Adobe Contribute.

If you happen to find anything else, please let me know…

The only thing that comes to mind immediately is developed to update Blogs not normal Web pages: Windows Live Writer.

We are using contribute with several clients. I am wondering if you are using Dreamweaver templates to keep your client from messing up their own site. We find that with Dreamweaver templates and CT the client can’t mess up any of the un-editable areas of the pages. They can only change the text only in areas we want them to be able to do this in.

You might want to make your client only a writer and not a publisher till you have this all sorted out.

I am not trying to be a smart ass and I want to make sure I don’t have the same problems so drop me an email if you think I need to have some more info about this totally crappy issue.

Sounds like a lot of work.

Hi Kevin and thanks for feedback, that’s greatly appreciated.

I don’t use Dreamweaver, largely because I just can’t stand it. I barely use WYSIWYG editors these days — maybe for the odd table or two.

That said, the files supplied by the previous agency had Dreamweaver tags in there, but they were all ignored by Contribute.

Since all of this nonsense emerged, I’m steering existing and new clients towards Joomla! for their CMS needs.

Yes, it’s a kludge in places, but it’s better than managing someone else’s broken software, like Adobe Contribute…

I manage a web design company and I have been using Contribute for many years without any problems. It has restrictions but works well with most small websites and find it is a well written piece of software. I hardcode my sites into Dreamweaver and as long as I code correctly when making the templates and set the users up all goes smoothly.

I would highly recommend Contribute for anyone that has a small website and wants to make regular updates to it.

Drupal and Joomla are time-consuming and expensive (for the client) to set up and nearly impossible for the average user to comprehend. Joomla, in particular, is not design-friendly, and both were created with the mistaken notion that all websites are or should be blogs.

Contribute on the other hand, is easy to learn and relatively easy to install. If you put the editable regions inside of the markup, and limit the user to your style sheet, you can minimize the damage.

The thing to remember is that ultimately the user looks at the content not the code.

Why would you build a client site on a CMS that you clearly didn’t understand? If the client was requiring Adobe Contribute and you didn’t know how to use it you should have passed on the project. It’s not Adobe’s fault that you didn’t take the time to learn how to use their application.

I admit there are several shortcomings in Adobe Contribute, but if you use it with DreamWeaver (like it’s designed) it’s very easy to create a site that looks good and works simply for clients. It may not be the purest code, but Adobe Contribute is cheap… you get what you (or your client) pays for.

“Why would you build a client site on a CMS that you clearly didn’t understand?”

I didn’t build anything with Adobe Contribute. The website had been built previously with Adobe DreamWeaver. The client insisted on using Adobe Contribute, despite my protestations.

Irrespective of who built the website, or the choice of CMS afterwards, Adobe are selling Contribute on its alleged simplicity and ease of use, which it lacks completely.

The CMS I make reference to is Adobe Contribute, not the website.

Adobe Contribute was and still is an utterly broken product, who many people have and continue to have many, many problems with…