MACROMEDIA CONTRIBUTE 3-DEPLOYING CONTRIBUTE Manual page 25

If you're not familiar with web page design or the HTML elements used to design a website,
contact your web team or the people responsible for creating your organization's website. If you're
in a smaller organization without access to web design resources, review the design-related articles
available on the Contribute Developer Center at www.macromedia.com/devnet/contribute.
Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Contribute
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 provides several features that make it an ideal environment
for designing and authoring pages in Contribute-enabled websites. When using Dreamweaver
and Contribute together, you need to remember several issues related to site design and to the
concurrent content updating by Contribute users.
Before you can use Dreamweaver to administer a Contribute site, you must enable Contribute
compatibility. Depending on the site to which you are connecting, you might be automatically
prompted to enable Contribute compatibility.
Note: When you enable Contribute compatibility, Dreamweaver automatically enables Design Notes
(including the Upload Design Notes for Sharing option) and the Check In/Check Out system.
To learn more about enabling Contribute compatibility in Dreamweaver, see "Managing
Contribute Sites with Dreamweaver" in Using Dreamweaver.
File Check In/ Check Out
Dreamweaver users should ensure that the Check In/Check Out feature is enabled, so that files
are not overwritten as they work in a collaborative environment. All Dreamweaver users should
ensure that any pages they are editing have been properly checked out to prevent the inadvertent
overwriting of pages.
When a user checks out a file from the remote server, Dreamweaver locks the file. No other
member of the web team can work on that file. Macromedia Contribute constantly checks the
status of files that the user is browsing. For instance, suppose that user A has checked out a file
and that user B attempts to edit it. User B sees a message in the status bar, and the Edit Page
button is disabled in user B's Contribute toolbar. For this reason, it is impossible for user B to
overwrite the file accidentally.
After user A finishes working on the file and publishes it to the site (by "checking it in" to the
server), user B's Edit Page button becomes active.
Design notes
When using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and Dreamweaver MX 2004, enable Design Notes
and upload them to the web server. Design Notes are notes associated with a page, but stored in a
separate file, that let you keep track of extra file information associated with your documents,
such as image source filenames and comments on file status.
Note: Dreamweaver 4 and Contribute are not compatible when Design Notes are enabled. For this
reason, Macromedia recommends using Dreamweaver MX or later for collaborative work on
Contribute websites.
Check In/Check Out and Design Notes are part of the Dreamweaver site settings options. To
learn how to enable Check In/Check Out and Design Notes, see Using Dreamweaver.
Content design considerations 25