Maintaining Your Site's Style and Layout

Although web developers are more than willing to allow users and clients to maintain their own content, the last thing they want them to do is mess around with the site's style and layout. Because Contribute 4 uses the power of the Dreamweaver 8 authoring engine, it fully supports CSS, XHTML, server-side code, and Dreamweaver 8 templates.

Protecting Scripting Code and Forms

Web developers do not want Contribute users inadvertently to delete any scripting code, whether client-side or server-side. Contribute users are therefore restricted by default from deleting or altering script tags, server-side includes, form tags and form elements, and code tags such as ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP.

If you find that you need to allow some users the right to modify this type of code, do the following:

1. From within Dreamweaver 8, choose Site > Administer Contribute Site.
2. Enter your administrator password.
3. Create a new role.
4. Click the Edit Role Settings button.
5. Select the Editing category.
6. Uncheck the Protect Scripts and Forms option.
7. Click OK to close the Edit Setting dialog box.
8. Click OK again to save the settings to your web server.

Filtering CSS and Limiting Available Styles

Contribute 4 shares the same rendering engine as that found in Dreamweaver 8, giving you the flexibility of creating advanced CSS-based layout that Contribute users can view and edit. However, Adobe understands that you do not want to expose any of your CSS rules that control page layout or cater unnecessarily to many of the cross-browser compatibility issues that go hand in hand with creating CSS-P pages. Therefore, with Contribute 4 you can create individual style sheets that users in each of your user roles can view and apply to editable content.

To limit the number of styles available to users:

1. Create a new CSS file and give it a title (filter.css).
2. Open an existing CSS document that contains the classes you wish to make available in the Contribute 4 Style pop-up menu.
3. Copy the desired classes from the source CSS file and paste them into the filter CSS file.
4. Save your filter file.
5. Upload both the source and filter CSS files.
6. Open the Roles dialog box.
7. Select the Styles and Fonts category.
8. From the Style support pop-up menu select Document Level CSS.

9. Select the following options:

   • Include CSS styles in the Styles menu
   • Limit CSS styles with the CSS styles filter
10. Click Choose and browse to the filter CSS file you want a specific user role to be able to select from the Styles menu.
11. Click OK to apply the changes.

Note: Designers and developers still have the flexibility to hide CSS rules using the mmhide syntax. However, due to a bug in Netscape, the "_" (underscore) is no longer necessary.

Integrating Design-Time Style Sheets

Dreamweaver users can take advantage of Design-Time Style Sheets and integrate them with pages that Contribute users view. Contribute 4 supports Design-Time Style Sheets in both template instances and non-template pages.

Note: Design-Time Style Sheets allow Dreamweaver users to create CSS styles that appear to Contribute users only when they edit a document. For example, you could use a Design-Time Style Sheet to provide additional information in Edit mode on how documents should be authored or edited.

Supporting Dreamweaver 8 Templates

As a developer, when you create pages for your Contribute users, you can take advantage of the many template tools available in Dreamweaver 8, such as optional regions, editable attributes, and nested templates.

Contribute users can create pages based on Dreamweaver 8 templates you provide them by selecting the Templates category in the New Page dialog box (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. Selecting a new page in Contribute based on an existing template

(+) View larger

When Contribute users create a new page that's based on a template containing optional regions or editable attributes, they see a message under the toolbar (see in Figure 8).

Figure 8. Notification of the existence of optional regions or editable attributes

Clicking the Template Properties link in this message displays the Template Properties dialog box, which allows Contribute users to show or hide the optional region or edit an item's attributes (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. Setting a template's properties

This feature means that not only can you allow your Contribute users to edit existing pages but you can let them create new pages based on your templates. This ensures that they can help drive the site forward without any fear of compromising your carefully crafted design.

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