Contribute Overview

Introduction

Contribute is a web authoring tool that will allow you to make quick changes to your web pages. The software has an easy WYSIWYG interface (What You See Is What You Get). It acts like a simplified word processor, which will let you insert images, tables, documents and hyperlinks to other documents on the web. Contribute operates in two modes: Browser Mode and Editor Mode.

Browser Mode

In Browser Mode , Contribute works just like a standard web browser. Once you've navigated to the web page you want to edit, simply click on the Edit Button. Contribute will then transfer the page from the staging web server to your local computer, depending if you have permission to edit the file and if the file is currently not locked by a different user or the administrator.

Below is a screenshot of the Contribute toolbar in browser mode :

The Choose button on the second row at the right is very useful. This will let you connect to the remote web server so that can choose particular file. This will come in handy if you need to find a draft page that hasn't been linked yet.

Editor Mode

In Editor Mode, Contribute will allow you, among other things, to:

• Insert text, images, tables and content from other documents
• Create links to web pages, PDF or other files
• Import Microsoft Word and Excel documents and convert them to HTML
• Create new web pages, based on your web site's template
• Make numbered or bulleted lists
• Select (custom) styles
• Check the spelling of your web content

Below is a screenshot of the Contribute toolbar in editor mode:

Collaboration

Contribute also makes it easy to collaborate. When you click on the Edit Page button, your web page will get a "checked out" status and Contribute will lock the file. As long as you've checked out the web page in editor mode, nobody else can work on that document and Contribute users you collaborate with will see a message like this:

As soon as you save the file to the staging web server by clicking on the Publish button, Contribute will check the file in and the lock will be released. Now the web page is available again for other people in your group or department and the Contribute Administrator.

Once the page is saved to the staging web server, you will still need to have it uploaded to the live public web server (this does not apply to internal pages, of course). In order to automate this, a custom toolbar has been created that is only be visible on the staging web server. This toolbar provides also links for web editors to resources on this web site and a quick link for contacting the Contribute Administrator. A Request Upload button will automatically record the URL of the requested web page and send an email to queue your page for upload.

Styles (Cascading Style Sheets)

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is an efficient mechanism to format text consistently through a central script. A few (custom) styles have been enabled on the LRI web sites. To assign one of these styles, highlight the text in the web page and make a selection from the Style Menu. This menu can be found under the Publish button.

A custom CSS file for Contribute users is provided to aid in the markup of the web page while they are working in Editor Mode. As soon as a web page is saved to the staging web server, a different CSS script will overrule the Contribute CSS script depending on the styles set for your departmental or group's web site. This is by design so that your web content will be legible in most web browsers. Available styles in Contribute's Editor Mode are:

Back to the Contribute main page