Sea Grant Week 2003 - Professional development
Summary: Content management is a way of allowing people besides the Lone Webmaster to add content to Web sites - without messing with parts of the page, or the site, that they shouldn't mess with.
"Conventional" content management systems are often expensive (tens of thousands of dollars and up) server-side applications and are targeted at large corporate intranets and other enterprises where many, many people need to put information on the Web.
At the less-expensive end of the scale are server-side applications such as Manila which allow people to generate their own blog-style Web pages, and languages such as ColdFusion which can be integrated with Web databases to provide a set of forms through which users can enter information which will then generate a preformatted Web page for, say, a training schedule.
New on the scene is Macromedia Contribute, a moderately priced client-side program that allows designated people to browse to Web folders where they've been granted editing rights, click and "edit" button and edit text just as they would in a word processing program, without knowing any HTML; when they choose "publish," their pages go directly to the Web (see below).
Site administrators can control which parts of a page are editable by using Dreamweaver templates; if desired, they can also designate a special "holding" folder on the server where contributor items are sent for editorial review before being moved to the publicly accessible part of the site.
Trainer James Carberry was kind enough to create two "user guides" to walk us through how Contribute works from the perspective of the Webmaster/administrator, and from the perspective of the editor/contributor.