IT Компромат - правда о HiTech

Seemingly bent on conforming Contribute’s marketing strategy around current Web memes, the publishing software will now reportedly boost publishing ROI by increasing content management efficiency. Not only is it a browser-less publishing tool, it also allows users to manage content living in Dreamweaver templates. Collaboration gains are offered once the Publishing Server is hitched up. That's the story.

Pricing

You can buy the desktop software outright for US$ 199 or existing owners can upgrade for US$ 99. A 5 user multi-pack lists for US$ 799 or you can go with the entire CS4 suite for US$ 1,699.

Contribute Publishing Server is an additional cost. Each CPS user must have a client access license which runs US$ 89 each. For example, if you have ten Contribute CS4 users connecting to a Contribute Publishing Server, then you need ten access licenses. This is similar to how Microsoft CALs work.

Ye Ol’ Requirements

The following is a list of the requirements we had for a good browser-less blogging service and how Contribute measures up:

• Runs on Windows [Yes!]
• Access to all of MT's article fields [Sort of…requires modifications .]
• WYSIWYG HTML/XHTML Editor [Yes!]
• Spell checker [Yes!]
• Access to article categories [Yes!]
• Ability to set publish date [Yes!]
• Access/editing of previous articles [No]
• Image/file upload support [Yes!]
• Support for multiple Blogs [Yes!]
• Usable, intuitive interface [Yes!]

Have a Look See

9/10 on the CMSWire scale ain’t bad, but it’s still not a 10. And there is some hacking around required to get close to replicating access to all of a blogs fields. Contribute has a field for Tags, for example, yet the contents of this field does not end up in Movable Type's Tags field — it get embedded in the body of the article.

With that said, the slew of options Adobe is known for offering with their products is nice. For starters, once you set up a Contribute connection to your blog (it’s fairly easy), you can choose to publish directly from Microsoft Word, from your browser (Windows only) or from Contribute’s Interface. This scenario of course only applies if you are using a limited set of fields (probably just Title, Category and Body).

The HTML manipulation tools work fairly well — as one would hope — but the Link tool was a bit annoying, in that a) it assumes you are linking internally to existing pages, and b) it does not support microformats (i.e., you cannot set the rel="foo" link attribute).

Admittedly, this is common problem with many current WYSIWYG HTML editors. And microformats are an advanced topic, yes. But we'd expect a company like Adobe to be on top of this.

The Sticking Point

Using the software is definitely a breeze. At face value, everything is pretty straightforward and almost all questions that do arise can be answered after just a few seconds of digging and clicking around.

For us, there's a fundamental issue that would prevent using Contribute for publishing CMSWire articles. The basic use case, from what we see is too simple. For starters, we have to hack Contribute a bit to access all of Movable Type's native article fields. That's not too big of a deal, but is a hint that we're probably going to run into other problems, as we stray from the core use case path.

We also employ a number of custom fields. Most blogging and publishing tools either support or will soon support content type extensibility. Contribute does not currently handle this (from our preliminary testing), nor will it likely handle this well, we're guessing.

A few other things tripped us up. First, we don't seem to have access to previous articles. That's a bummer, since having that knowledge locally in the tool is very useful to an author.

Secondly, tags are a semi-controlled vocabulary. A good authoring interface will auto-fill tags to help keep this semi-control in place. That does not happen with Contribute. This means we're going to have a noisier vocabulary with a lot more duplication.

On another serious downside, entries that we’ve already got tucked away for in Draft mode in Movable Type aren’t accessible through Contribute. Though there’s a Send It feature to enable accessing your current entry from multiple computers, and even the ability to roll back to previous versions, once it’s published it seems it’s sent out in to the webverse without the slightest trace of it left on the software.

Extra, Extra

In addition to fulfilling most of our requirements from 2004 , Contribute 5 offers a ton of features that have become the norm in more recent times: