Web administrators all over the world face a unique challenge. They find themselves spending a lot of time and energy on routine website updates. This not only overloads the administrator—wasting precious design and development resources—but also creates a bottleneck for publishing web content. Administrators would like individual business users to publish their own content, but are concerned about maintaining site integrity.

When we launched Macromedia Contribute four years ago, we had one goal: to make web publishing so easy that business users with no technical knowledge could do it themselves. At the same time, Contribute ensured that website design could not be tampered with, so administrators could reliably delegate the task of web publishing to business users.

Now Adobe Contribute 4 empowers individual content contributors even more by introducing Anywhere Publishing (see Figure 1). It allows users to publish to both blogs and websites using the same easy interface, and also to publish from external applications such as Microsoft Office or web browsers.

Figure 1. Anywhere Publishing with Contribute 4

This is a brief introduction to some of the new features in Adobe Contribute 4.

Blog authoring

Blogs have seen very rapid adoption in the last two years, and are increasingly seen as indispensable in corporate and academic environments. It is estimated that a new blog is created every second of every day¹, and that a majority of US companies will be running blogs by the end of the year² (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Two out of three US companies will run blogs by the end of the year

Adobe Contribute 4 makes blog authoring easy and intuitive, so users throughout the organization can start writing blogs.

To get started, all you need is a valid blog—either on a blog service like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress or on your own in-house blog server. You need to connect to the blog only once and Contribute remembers your connection details for subsequent connections. If you have multiple blogs on the same platform, Contribute automatically connects to all of them, as shown in the following example:

• Connect to a blog using Adobe Contribute 4

Furthermore, Contribute is the only blog authoring tool that allows you to edit your blog entries in full context. When you are editing an entry, you can see exactly how it will look in the browser. What you see is truly what you get. This means you can control the look and feel of your blog far more precisely than in a browser interface. Speaking of WYSIWYG, formatting your blog entries is as easy as typing in a word processor. You don't need to know HTML even for complex formatting requirements. The same goes for inserting images, video, and audio into your blog entries. Simply drag and drop the files into your entry, and Contribute automatically publishes them to the right place.

With Adobe Contribute 4, you get the same easy interface for publishing to websites as well as blogs. In fact, you can switch seamlessly between the two, and work on multiple web pages and blog entries at the same time.

Publishing from a web browser

Bloggers almost never write in isolation. They constantly feed off one another and build upon content that is already available on the web. Adobe Contribute 4 makes it easy to blog about something you come across while browsing the web. Simply select the content and click the Post to Blog button that Contribute provides right in your browser, as shown in the following example:

• Post to blog from a browser using Adobe Contribute 4

You can also edit a web page currently open in the browser. Very often, one comes across a page that needs to be updated or corrected but it's too much trouble to open it in another application. Now you can just click the Edit in Contribute button right in your web browser and start editing the page (assuming you have the right permissions).

Publishing from Microsoft Office applications

Very often people create original content in a Microsoft Office application (Word or Excel) and copy it to a web page. Adobe Contribute 4 eliminates this unnecessary copy/paste step and allows direct publishing from Microsoft Word applications. You can also choose to edit the content in Contribute before publishing it as a web page or blog entry. See the following example:

• Publishing from Microsoft Office applications

Including Adobe Flash Video

Adobe Flash Video (FLV) is fast becoming the de-facto standard for video publishing on the web. With Adobe Contribute 4, you can include Flash Video files in your web pages and blog entries with a simple drag-and-drop operation.

Where to go from here

Visit the Adobe Contribute 4 product page and take the feature tour to learn more and see examples of what you can do with the new version. Subscribe to the Contribute blog to get the latest from the Contribute development team. Share your innovations with the community at the Contribute Developer Center.

1. ¹ State of the Blogosphere report, Q2 2006, Technorati.com
2. ² Jupiter Research Corporate Blogs Survey, 2005

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