Dreamweaver - Contribute

Author

Contribute

anyoldcard

2006-10-06, 5:25 pm

I recently moved a friends website to a new server. For 2 years he has been editing his pages with Contribute. They are not template driven pages, only html pages but there are over 400 pages.

When I viewed his images folder, he had over 2500 images. Some were duplicates of the original images but with an extension of 001, 002, 003 and etc. They had been saved so many times they had lost their original glow and are now dull.

The images are not the big problem. I have suggested server side includes to make changes in 1 area so that the changes would take place site wide. Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Contribute was designed for template driven web pages and not just for eveyday editing. I'm I correct in what I am telling this person?

He says, "yah but I have used it for 2 years" and I say yes but what a mess you have created. Am I right in trying to convince him to use templates or at least find another way to edit his pages other than contribute?

Thanks for any help on this.
Ron.

anyoldcard

2006-10-08, 3:31 am

When did this place die?

#comment

2006-11-13, 8:48 am

quote:
[i] Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Contribute was designed for template driven web pages and not just for eveyday editing. [/B]

Yes contribute works with templates. You can design the pages using templates built in dreamweaver and if any global changes need to be made you just edit the template and it will update all of the pages that were created using that template automatically.

Also you can lock all of the areas that you don't want altered like navigation etc.

anyoldcard

2006-11-14, 5:45 am

quote:
Originally posted by #comment
Yes contribute works with templates. You can design the pages using templates built in dreamweaver and if any global changes need to be made you just edit the template and it will update all of the pages that were created using that template automatically.

Also you can lock all of the areas that you don't want altered like navigation etc.

Theres an elderly gentleman that I set up 2 sites for. One is an osCommerce site with a cart and the other is just a basic html site. He edits the html pages with Contribute and when I ftp in there are just tons of duplicated images like 001, 002, 003 and so on. Everytime he edits it resaves the jpg's and since they are lossy files they look really bad after about the 10th time of saving.

I told him that Contribute was designed for editing template pages by Macromedia with a tpl extention and that I could set his pages up so that there would be editable regions. On an older site that he had that totaled 500 images before using contribute, now has 3500 images in the folders. If there was an image for instance called logo.jpg after he gets done there are images named logo001.jpg, logo002.jpg, logo003.jpg and so one up to 15 016 copies per image. My question is, because these page do not utilize the tpl extention is that the reason Contribute is creating the additional images or could it be something in the way he is using Contribute. The pages are mostly html and shtml pages. Thanks for any help on this because I know very little about Contribute.
Ron.

#comment

2006-11-14, 6:02 am

Contribute works on a file check-in / check-out basis, when you open a page for editing a draft is created. When you publish the draft a backup of the previous page is stored so if you make a mistake you can rollback to a previous version.

The problem sounds like something the client is doing as apposed to contribute but without knowing exactly what he is doing it is hard to say exactly. Can you ask him what process he is following when editing his site?