Macromedia Contribute 3 review

When all you want is a speedy update, an expensive full-blown web tool such as Dreamweaver is overkill.

That's precisely why you'd use Contribute. It looks like a browser, works like a word processor and, in its third incarnation, has a beefed-up set of tools that make it the editor of choice for simple web publishing.

You connect to a site using either the wizard or a connection key emailed to you by a Dreamweaver administrator, and then browse it inside Contribute by clicking through links on the existing pages. When you come across an out-of-date page, you hit Edit and use Word-style font and table tools to lay out your changes.

Behind the scenes, though, Contribute is far more impressive. The software writes your pages as a mixture of CSS-based styling and legacy table-based layouts, in contrast to Dreamweaver's push for pure CSS. It respects existing style sheets but writes any additional styles, such as a single instance of a heavy font, into the local header rather than to the style sheet. This is our first real gripe. The risk here is that your site will end up with a series of similar but distinct styles, which does little to promote a professional appearance.

More positively, while you can't edit the underlying code by hand, the styling complies with the strictest guidelines, and fonts are specified as families rather than single entities. It can also be used to build pages from scratch and includes a range of time-saving wizards for embedding PayPal 'Buy Me' buttons, which will walk you through the sign-up process. Another walkthrough adds Google search boxes that can be tailored to search only your site rather than the whole of the web, and to filter out smut using SafeSearch.

The setup correctly spotted that we had a folder named public_html on our site and automatically set this as the destination for our pages. It was also smart enough to check whether pages had been edited by someone else since we opened them and warn us if it looked like we were going to overwrite more recent updates. After we activated checking in and out in Dreamweaver and then checked out a page we wanted to use in Contribute, we discovered that it bars any further changes rather than allowing us to open a draft for saving under a different name, which we found somewhat unfriendly. We were using a beta, though, so this could be resolved in the final release.

Contribute is aimed at the low-level site maintainer and has a particular focus on repurposing existing documents, with a range of options to embed Microsoft Office files. These include links and imported text, although we found that importing lost much of the original formatting. It is preferable to convert documents first using the bundled Flash Paper 2 printer driver. This works in a similar way to Adobe's Acrobat distiller but, instead of producing a standalone file, gives results that can be positioned inline on your web page, for a more unified feel.

Flash Paper documents can be zoomed, searched and printed, just like Acrobat files, but can't be password-protected, so instead the driver optionally renders its output as PDF for added security. However, as the Flash Player is installed on 97 per cent of all PCs and Acrobat on only 81 per cent, you could lose potential readers. Further, our tests showed that documents of a couple of pages or more that also used embedded images actually rendered as smaller files when converted to Flash Paper rather than PDF. So, if you value your bandwidth - and your visitors' time - this is worth bearing in mind.