Coldfusion and Contribute
I've been looking at Contribute recently and its concepts, from what i can tell it looks damn good for its purpose. What i can't see is how to intergrate it with ColdFusion Frameworks like Fusebox. What im thinking is that Contribute is no good for all my old projects as they are all FB3, and for my future sites im gonna need to go back to a good old .htm/.cfm per page (rather than <cfinclude>'d via a central point) so they can be navigated to and edited.
Or are users still having frameworks and just breaking them by having pages like the "Welcome Page", "F.A.Q" and "About Us" as single, editable .cfm/.htm pages?
Comments
as soon as contribute entered beta way back at DevCon 2002 a number of us sat down playing with Contribute and it just barfed when you tried to edit a Fusebox 3 app...I think it's just a none starter to be honest.
jb.
jb.
I don't see Contribute as a great blend with ColdFusion. I feel that Contribute is better suited as competition to SitePont. simple site creation and management with quick implementation.
If you have the investment in Coldfusion, frameworks, and dynamic sites, look into FarCry, an open source content managment system, With a little development effort, you could put up a decent system without the individual user cost of a software package. You could also implement Spectra, since Macromedia open sourced it (http://spectrasource.macromedia.com/active/).
If you have the investment in Coldfusion, frameworks, and dynamic sites, look into FarCry, an open source content managment system, With a little development effort, you could put up a decent system without the individual user cost of a software package. You could also implement Spectra, since Macromedia open sourced it (http://spectrasource.macromedia.com/active/).
Contribute is designed to solve the problem of content specialists easily editing HTML files sitting on a server.
It doesn't modify content stored in various databases, true... usually in that case your database and application server would expose some type of editing interface.
(I can see how it would be desirable to have in-context editing of database content, where a content specialist could look at an HTML page as it is finally delivered, and any changes they make get propagated back into the original database which is its actual storage place. That's a much bigger task than just in-context editing of regular HTML, though, and would require a server component too.)
jd/mm
It doesn't modify content stored in various databases, true... usually in that case your database and application server would expose some type of editing interface.
(I can see how it would be desirable to have in-context editing of database content, where a content specialist could look at an HTML page as it is finally delivered, and any changes they make get propagated back into the original database which is its actual storage place. That's a much bigger task than just in-context editing of regular HTML, though, and would require a server component too.)
jd/mm
I'm not sure why CFers seem to think that Contribute would be useful for editing CF sites? It's designed for non-technical users who have to work with (often large) static sites.
I use CT extensively for editing project websites (all static), my wife uses it to edit the (static) website I created for her in DW (http://www.bangles.com/) and another group use CT to edit a site I created in DW (http://www.catagility.com/).
A dynamic CMS isn't appropriate for those sites but Contribute is perfect for them. Use the right tool for the right job.
I use CT extensively for editing project websites (all static), my wife uses it to edit the (static) website I created for her in DW (http://www.bangles.com/) and another group use CT to edit a site I created in DW (http://www.catagility.com/).
A dynamic CMS isn't appropriate for those sites but Contribute is perfect for them. Use the right tool for the right job.
Hi Sean, after reading your comment it seems to me that that is a very single focused view? :o) The reason im looking into it is that what i am thinking is that a lot of the key pages(customer focused) could be a simple .cfm using custom tags for the layout. From what i know these region (via DWMX) can be made non-editable - all good so far and i can let users go off and edit as needed. Then for the rest of the site where the text will hardly change I can plugin a framework?
If you have a "simple" CFM page, I expect you can edit it in CT. But Fusebox doesn't present a "simple" CFM page - it always presents index.cfm and that ends up including all sorts of little display pages.
If you use CT to browse directly to a display fuse URL, you can probably edit it that way but since CT is a client-based tool, it would have no way to know how to get from index.cfm?fa=home.main to /home/dsp_main.cfm for example.
My personal site is built with Mach II - I *can* use CT to edit the view pages as long as I know which URLs to browse but I would be more likely to use DW to edit my site since my views are just page fragments and not full pages.
If you use CT to browse directly to a display fuse URL, you can probably edit it that way but since CT is a client-based tool, it would have no way to know how to get from index.cfm?fa=home.main to /home/dsp_main.cfm for example.
My personal site is built with Mach II - I *can* use CT to edit the view pages as long as I know which URLs to browse but I would be more likely to use DW to edit my site since my views are just page fragments and not full pages.
Also, there are probably many, many more static HTML sites than there are dynamic scripted sites - so I think CT has a very, very broad appeal (just not to developers - but, hey, it is *aimed* at business users).
Hi Andy,
I just wanted to let you know that this month we have a UKCFUG meeting where Andi Hindle and Lucas Sherwood will be showing how to integrate ColdFusion with Contribute.
The meeting is at the end of the month. Check out the newly designed user group website <a href="http://www.ukcfug.org/">here</a>; for more information:
<a href="http://www.ukcfug.org/">http://www.ukcfug....;
Niklas
I just wanted to let you know that this month we have a UKCFUG meeting where Andi Hindle and Lucas Sherwood will be showing how to integrate ColdFusion with Contribute.
The meeting is at the end of the month. Check out the newly designed user group website <a href="http://www.ukcfug.org/">here</a>; for more information:
<a href="http://www.ukcfug.org/">http://www.ukcfug....;
Niklas
Grrrrr the meeting is on the 26th, i cant make it due to birthday plans. Hopefully though presentations will be made available afterwards for those who couldnt attend, *wink* wink*
Well, I'm sure we'll try! :)
Happy Birthday for then!
Happy Birthday for then!