Setting Up as an Administrator In Contribute

Working with Adobe Contribute is the preferred method of editing websites for many people. With it’s easy browser-turns-word processor interface, using it requires a small and gentle learning curve.

For web designers who offer or suggest this way of updating page content to their clients, it is advisable to set administration rights. In fact, if more than one person is going to be editing content, it is a good idea for one person to take on the administrator’s role so they can issue connection keys giving different levels of control to users.

See this video for setting up a new website connection with Contribute.

To start, on a Mac, open Contribute and go to the Contribute Menu, then My Connections… (On Windows it’s under the Edit Menu). Select the site you want to Administer and click the Administer button:

Contribute Administer Button

On the dialog box that appears, I prefer the Dreamweaver-style editing option. This means that hitting the enter/return key creates proper paragraphs, with any top or bottom margins that may have been specified in the CSS.

Click Yes to become the Administrator and you will shortly be presented with the Administration panel:

Contribute Administration Box

(If you go to close this panel you will be asked for an Admin password.)

From here you can add and edit users and their roles, send out Connection keys and enable the very handy Rollbacks feature. I’ll cover this in another post.

You might want to click the Compatibility link on the left (see image above) and choose Transition Mode as this will make it more likely that users of other versions can make edits too.

The two basic user types are:

Publisher – Users in this role can create and edit pages, as well as publish pages to the website.
Writer – Users in this role can edit pages, but cannot publish pages to the website.

You can create your own user types with various levels of control and you can even determine where these users arrive at the site when they connect.