A Technology Step Backward?
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I started my life in coldfusion as a commercial developer. I worked for a development company and clients came to use to have us build them web sites and applications. I quickly found my development style synced well with fusebox and never looked back. But now I am considering a different path which throws away all that I have preached for so long. Its only one site, but I think it shows a shift in how I look at things. Really I think it may be the difference between building sites for a client vs your employer. Read on for my thoughts.
Hey Simeon,
We did this at ISITE a few times while I was there. Check out http://www.staffingsolutionsllc.com for an example. The job posting are a small CF app. The news area is all Contribute.
There are a couple of keys for this solution. The biggest one being that you should plan on your site working this way from the start. Then you’ll clearly know where you’re going to have CF and where it’s managed by Contribute. You might go insane if you have a retrofit any sites for Contribute that didn’t have it before and was dynamic. The other thing we noticed was for the cfincludes to be picked up by Contribute, when editing, all the file paths were case-sensitive, even on an all Windows environment. It was weird to figure out, but it helps the end-user see the final results.
Enjoy Contribute.
Yo Simeon,
As you know, I’ve been a Contribute user / advocate for a while now, and love the product. Yes, there are a few issues with it but they are minor compared to the power you get out of it. Here are a few of my biggest issues with using it:
1. Extensions are not managed via Extension Manager.
**This became an issue when my users wanted to post links to Amazon for books they recommended. The Amazon link is an embedded frame tag that is invisible when rendered so even if they could add directly to the editable regions in the source code, there would not be a render in the design view. So, to work around this, I built an extension for Dreamweaver, tested it, and had the packaged it as a self-extracting zip file to place it on the end users computer. Since Contribute is actually built on the Dreamweaver base code, it worked fine. Also, I wrapped the frame tag in a table so the cell would be visible to grab and delete if needed. **
2. The Design View does not always refresh.
** Here I had a user that wanted to cut and paste a bunch of text from another application into a page edited with contribute, but after pasting, the screen didn’t refresh and it looked like it was cutting off the bottom. Work around, publish and check it back out again. **
3. You can’t make local links full path urls.
** This issue came up when my user wanted to create a newsletter that he could edit with contribute and send via their business software. The business software can use an htm file as a template and merge names & email addresses, but the links to the graphics were all relative links and therefore would not be seen by the end user. You can bang on HTML emails if you want, but this was cutting an 8 page text email into a one pager with links back to the site for more details…greatly improving the experience!!! (plug on MM’s phrases) :)
4. The FTP client is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW.
** I know you hate ftp Sim, but for most users this is the default method. When contribute opens up, it syncs all templates and verifies connection to all sites. When you edit a page, it checks out all relative files, (which is a good thing) but first gathers the entire site worth of info…this takes a long time if you are not on the network updating via local access. **
Okay, that’s all for now. BTW, Awesome Blog…I got a copy of NewsGator at work the other day and subscribed to you blog yesterday. Keep up the great work!!!
Phil