Macromedia Contribute 3

For the benefit of those people who find themselves too busy making routine content updates to their websites to research new titles, Contribute provides a boxed content management solution at a fraction of the price of a bespoke system.

Once installed, anyone with even the most basic word processing skills can update their website while you, as the site manager, effectively determine the appropriate permissions so that only relevant data is updated. Plus, with Dreamweaver template recognition it’s possible to lock page regions so that no nasty surprises appear in the navigation bar.

The new support for CSS-P (cascading style sheets positioning) is one of the most appealing reasons to upgrade – so long to those annoying ‹font› tags. Content authors can add video content and have the ability to edit imagery to the same degree as in Dreamweaver, while Mac users will find solid support for QuickTime and Safari. A new approval system has also been introduced, which means that new content can be delayed before it’s applied to a site. FlashPaper has been updated, too, so such content can be created directly from MS Office.

Such enhancements merely scratch the surface of what’s on offer here. There’s no denying that the third generation of Contribute continues to deliver crucial tools for today’s busy site manager.