Macromedia Contribute gives you a new approach for building websites with Dreamweaver MX and other familiar web technologies. As a web professional, you build sites and applications for your clients for their external websites and their intranets. In both cases, once you complete the site, you’ve only done half the work—the easy half.

The hard part of developing the site is deciding how the team members will interact with the site; in short, to decide what they’re allowed to do to the pages. Once you decide on a process, you must teach the participants (some of whom may be non-technical) how to access the site, change pages, and what not to do. Using Macromedia Contribute for this process reduces your load in this area.

Part one of this two-part tutorial teaches you to use Contribute as a project contributor, not the site designer. The second part of the tutorial, “Administering Macromedia Contribute,” will teach you to administer the site and create the site infrastructure, so your users can effectively use Contribute.When you complete both tutorials, you will be able to build a site that allows you to define participants’ access in your site and what they can do, such as: edit or add pages and links, import Microsoft Word documents without your assistance, and more. In short, you won’t need to hold their hands or fear that they might mistakenly damage the work you’ve created.

System requirements
To complete this tutorial you will need:

1. Macromedia Contribute. Install the program locally on your machine.
2. Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) Web Server installed locally on your machine. Your user will not need to install this, but you will need to install it for this tutorial. Typically, your user will connect to the website or a staging server, depending on your team’s workflow.
3. The tutorial demo files. Download them (280K). Follow the steps in the next section to install the tutorial demo files.

Installing the tutorial demo files
Unzip the sample files on your desktop. The ZIP file will unzip the following two items:

• A folder named TrioNet, which contains files that you will use to complete the tutorial. Move the TrioNet folder to your webroot directory (for IIS, this is typically at: c:inetpubwwwroot).

  If you use another web server or have defined another webroot, you can place the folder there.

  

  Note: You will have to change some of the steps in this tutorial if you choose to place the folder outside the webroot directory.

• A connection key, named TrioSupplierProject-Users.stc. You can leave it on your desktop for now.

  Note: You can put the file anywhere on your system, as you can throw it away when you are done with it.