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You are a business owner with a wonderful
new website created by your web
developer. You have just purchased
Macromedia Contribute, a new content
solution created by the leader
in professional web design software;
with it, you're ready to add and
update the pages of your website
yourself. Your site administrator
will handle the technical content.
You have installed the program.
Now what?
This article will help you get going
with Contribute in just a few easy
steps. First, we are going to discuss
how to set up a local site, access
web pages, and edit them with Contribute.
Second, we will show you how to publish
the finished pages to the remote site
and how to create new pages. After
you complete these easy steps, you
will be able to do routine maintenance
on your own!
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Macromedia Contribute truly offers, as the slogan
puts it, "relief for web professionals." But
you may not realize that this newly introduced
program can provide another function as well.
With some minor modification, Contribute serves
as a terrific business development tool. By
customizing Contribute, you can supply solutions
tailored to a particular client in a co-branded
environment.
Contribute was built on the extremely extensible
Dreamweaver MX foundation. Much of the interface,
such as menus and toolbars, as well as the functionality
found in objects and commands is also extensible
in Contribute. In addition, there are two new areas
open to customization:
- Welcome page: The very first
page users see when they start Contribute can
be customized and, if desired, co-branded with
your company's name and information.
- Task panel: The lower portion
of the Contribute sidebar, labeled with a user-friendly "How
Do I" notation, provides a quick reference
for basic program tasks—and can be customized
to guide your client's users through company
or industry-specific operations.
In this article, I examine how you can customize
the Welcome page; a companion article, published
in the Macromedia newsletter The
Edge, covers modification to the Task
panel.
Welcome to the Welcome page
If you've done any extensibility work with Dreamweaver,
you're no doubt familiar with the Configuration
folder. Contribute, too, has a Configuration
folder, both for the system and the individual
user. To customize the Welcome page, you must
navigate to the system configuration folder,
typically found at C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Contribute\Configuration.
Within the Configuration folder, you'll find
many subfolders; locate the Content folder and,
within it, open the Welcome folder (see Figure
1).
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| Figure
1. The path to the Welcome folder |
You may be surprised to not find a welcome.htm
file in the Welcome folder; after all, Contribute
is basically browsing to an HTML file to show
the Welcome page. However, the Contribute engineers
have more than a few tricks up their collective
sleeves and one of them is to automatically
generate a welcome.htm file when the program
launches. This HTML file is based on the Dreamweaver
template found in the Welcome folder, welcome.dwt.
Why take this roundabout approach? To understand
their reasoning all you need do is take a close
look at the default Welcome page. To the first-time
user, it may not be obvious that there's more happening
here than would be possible with a standard web
page (see Figure 2), but once you add a Contribute
connection or two, the page begins to looks a bit
more like an application interface with some very
non-HTML features.
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| Figure
2. Macromedia Contribute application interface. |
After the helpful links inviting users to learn
more about Macromedia Contribute or try out
the tutorial, you'll notice a series of other
links providing immediate access to any of
the user's sites. Normally, this integration
of external data and web page would not be
possible outside of an application server environment.
Following the connection list, you'll find
a "Don't show this page on startup" option
typically reserved for alerts and dialog boxes.
As you'll see, Contribute includes a few extensibility
mechanisms under the hood that make this kind
of functionality possible, while keeping the
page customizable.
Adding your brand
To begin modifying the Welcome page, open the file
Contribute\Configuration\Content\Welcome\welcome.dwt
in Dreamweaver. I recommend storing a backup
of the original welcome.dwt just in case you
accidentally delete an element of the code you
want to retain. Now you're free to make any changes
that you see fit—with certain restrictions.
Although the file is a Dreamweaver template, most
of the standard rules regarding templates do not
apply here. Here are the ground rules for editing
the Welcome page:
- The file is not stored in the Templates folder.
It must be kept in its current location to be
handled appropriately by Contribute.
- The only document derived from this template
is created automatically by Contribute when the
program launches. It is not necessary to perform
a New from Template operation.
- Any links from the page should be absolute
(as in "http://www.leafmedia.com")
or created by an internal JavaScript call, as
described later.
- Assets for the page—images and CSS sheets—should
be stored within the Welcome folder, either in
the same folder as the welcome.dwt file or in
a subfolder.
- To retain the additional functionality of the
standard Welcome page—such as the connection
listings and the "don't show this page" option—it's
better to modify the existing page instead of
moving elements from the default Welcome page
to a newly designed page. I discuss the reason
for this approach in the next section.
When you're done, you can have an entirely different
look-and-feel for the Contribute welcome page (see
Figure 3) that reflects your brand and provides
any additional support links that you think are
necessary.
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Figure
3. A rebranded Contribute welcome page.
(Click the image to see the full-sized screen.) |
Maintaining the special features
Just how does Contribute add their special features?
By applying a combination of advanced Dreamweaver
template techniques with enhanced Contribute API
JavaScript functions. Let's take a closer look
at how it all works together, so that you can understand
how to modify the page better.
The listing of sites uses two conditional regions,
an editable region and a repeating region, as you
can see in this code (indentation added for clarification):
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<!--
TemplateBeginIf cond="!HasSites" -->
<a href="mmjs:CCWorkspaceManager.getManager(dw.getDocumentDOM()) .doWelcomePageStart();">
<strong>Start editing</strong></a> pages
on your website.
<!-- TemplateEndIf -->
<!-- TemplateBeginIf cond="HasSites" -->
Start editing pages on your website:<br>
<blockquote style="margin-top: 0;">
<!-- TemplateBeginRepeat
name="Site" -->
<!--
TemplateBeginEditable name="SiteName" -->
Site
name
<!--
TemplateEndEditable -->
<br>
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->
</blockquote>
<!-- TemplateEndIf --> |
The first conditional region displays a link to the
My Connections dialog box if no connections have
been created yet through an API call. The second
conditional region appears if any connections have
been created. Both conditional regions depend on
a template parameter found in the <head> of
the document called HasSites. Be sure to preserve
this code when modifying the page: |
<!-- TemplateParam name="HasSites" type="boolean" value="true" --> |
Both the repeating and editable regions are contained
within the second conditional region. Be careful
not to alter the names of these regions: Site
and SiteName, respectively. Modifying the names
breaks the functionality.
The other unique feature on this page, the "Don't
show this page on startup" option, uses an
internal cookie. When the user clicks the option,
the cookie (dontshow) is set to either true or
false. If the cookie is true, the Welcome page
is bypassed and the initially declared connection
is shown. The naming of the checkbox (dontShowCheckbox),
as well as its onClick function call, is critical
to keep if you want to maintain this option.
Should you not want to give your users the option
of seeing the Welcome page, you'll need to do more
than just remove the form element containing the
checkbox and all of its contents. If you look at
the <body> tag, notice the onLoad event that
calls initControls(). The initControls() function
populates the checkbox in the Welcome page if the
dontshow cookie is set. How do users show the Welcome
page once they've opted not to see it? The page
is displayed whenever they choose Help > Welcome.
If you want to remove the "don't show" option,
be sure to also remove the onLoad event from the <body> tag
and the initControls() function from the <head>.
Deploying your custom pages
The major hurdle to customizing Macromedia Contribute
in this first release is the lack of support
for the Extension Manager. This is similar to
the early days of Dreamweaver when you installed
extensions by copying files manually. To add
your own Welcome page (and all of its assets),
try one of these three options:
- Deliver the files with a help file that describes
where the files should be copied.
- Use a third-party installer to deploy the files
in an existing installation of Contribute. Unless
you know for sure that Contribute is always installed
in the same location, the installer should be
able to read the Windows registry and locate
the Contribute installation folder.
- Use a third-party installer to deploy a new
installation of Contribute bundled with the Welcome
page. This option requires a more sophisticated
installer than the second option.
If you decide to go the third-party installer route,
there are numerous options available, from the extremely
high-end (and costly) to low-end, shareware versions.
Whichever route you take, once the installation is
complete, your business stands to benefit by associating
your brand with that of easy-to-use, powerful Macromedia
Contribute. |
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About the author
Joseph Lowery is an author and extension developer.
His books on the Web and Web-building tools are
international best-sellers, having sold over 300,000
copies world-wide in 9 different languages. He
is the author of the Beyond Dreamweaver, Roadmap
to Macromedia Contribute and co-author of Dreamweaver
MX Killer Tips, all from New Riders, as well
as Dreamweaver MX Bible and the Fireworks
MX Bible series from Wiley Publishing. As a
programmer, Joseph contributed two extensions to
the latest release of Fireworks MX and many, many
extensions for Dreamweaver. With Ben Weiser, he
developed the widely-used Deva Tools for Dreamweaver
and most recently released FlashBang! in partnership
with Edoardo Zubler. He is also a consultant and
trainer and has presented at Seybold in both Boston
and San Francisco, Macromedia UCON in the U.S.
and Europe, ThunderLizard's Web World and Fawcette
Publication's WebBuilder.
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