CONTRIBUTE 3 Deploying Contribute
Trademarks Add Life to the Web, Afterburner, Aftershock, Andromedia, Allaire, Animation PowerPack, Aria, Attain, Authorware, Authorware Star, Backstage, Bright Tiger, Clustercats, ColdFusion, Contribute, Design In Motion, Director, Dream Templates, Dreamweaver, Drumbeat 2000, EDJE, EJIPT, Extreme 3D, Fireworks, Flash, Flash Lite, Flex, Fontographer, FreeHand, Generator, HomeSite, JFusion, JRun, Kawa, Know Your Site, Knowledge Objects, Knowledge Stream, Knowledge Track, LikeMinds, Lingo, Live Effects, MacRec
CONTENTS Deploying Contribute to Departments and Enterprises ....................... 5 Contribute deployment responsibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Deployment tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Deployment issues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 User management models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Contents
Deploying Contribute to Departments and Enterprises Macromedia Contribute is a website editor that lets people connect to departmental and other websites so that they can update web page content. Administrative assistants, product managers, human resource managers, and other people in an organization can use Contribute to update their workgroup’s web pages without having to contact a web team or other departmental resources.
Contribute deployment responsibilities As a system or website administrator, you play a large part in deploying Contribute. The deployment responsibilities include the following tasks: • Installing the Contribute software. • Creating connections to websites that users of Contribute (called content editors) access. • Defining roles (a collection of privileges that you assign to a specific user or group of users). Roles determine which users have, or are denied, access to a specific website.
Role Function Web developer Develops web-based applications, such as for absence reporting and financial reporting, distributed to users over the web. Contribute user Contribute users range widely in their job tasks and computer experience. What they have is common is the need to update web page content quickly and easily. Using Contribute, they can easily connect to a website and safely update its content without inadvertently introducing malfunctions.
Task Description Create Contribute roles Create Contribute roles based on the privileges and restrictions you want to place on a user’s ability to access and edit pages within the site. For more information, see “Contribute user roles” on page 17. Deploy Contribute to your user base Deploy Contribute to your users, and send them connection key files so they can access the website. To learn more about distributing website connections, see “Website connection distribution” on page 21.
Although these questions may seem obvious, it’s good to think about them before you create a connection to your website with Contribute. The sections below will help to provide you with background information on these questions, and how they relate to installing and configuring Contribute. Understanding network and server permissions Contribute is unique in that it allows editing of web pages directly on the server hosting your website.
About Contribute administrative settings Contribute administrative settings are a collection of settings that apply to all users of your website. These settings let you fine-tune Contribute to provide a better user experience. The Contribute administrative settings are as follows: Users and Roles lets you add users to the site, and create, edit, and delete roles. Administration lets you specify a primary administrator for the site, set an administrator password, and remove administration.
Related topics • “Configuring Contribute administration settings” in Macromedia Contribute Help Contribute site structure The connection you create to a website with Contribute determines the network protocol to use when accessing the site, the web address (URL) of the site, and the degree to which the site’s structure is accessible to content contributors. Before creating a connection to a website, carefully consider how users will access the site and what areas of the site they will need to access.
The following example shows overlapped connection paths: connection1: www.mysite.com/intranet/ connection2: www.mysite.com/intranet/marketing In the following example, the paths do not overlap: connection1: www.mysite.com/intranet/marketing connection2: www.mysite.com/intranet/finance Contribute administrative files and folders Contribute creates a special administrative folder (labeled _mm) that contains a shared settings file in each website you create a connection to.
Local area networks When Contribute is used to connect to a web server through a local network, the web server must be visible to the local network. Contribute can also be used with virtual private network (VPN) servers to ensure that all file transmissions occur behind your firewall. If the web server is not visible to the local network, you can create an FTP connection with Contribute to work with the website (if the server you’re creating a connection to has an FTP server installed).
Secure FTP SFTP is a secure version of the FTP protocol. Like SSH, SFTP prevents unauthorized users from gaining access to password and user information that is sent without encryption over the Internet. Standard FTP sends the user ID and password as clear (that is, unencrypted) text, allowing anyone monitoring your FTP data to see your user ID and password, as well the data being transmitted. With SFTP, everything you transmit is encrypted, protecting it from monitoring by intruders.
WebDAV Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is a series of extensions to the HTTP protocol that lets users collaboratively update and manage files on a website. A key feature of the WebDAV protocol is file locking. Users connecting to a WebDAV-enabled site lock files when they open the file for editing. This prevents a user of the same website from overwriting another user’s changes.
Contribute and directory services Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP are protocols for accessing information directories. In the case of directory services, a directory is like a phone book and not like a directory (folder) on your computer. When connecting to an LDAP or Active Directory server, Contribute adheres to any file/folder permissions set by the directory service.
To use Publishing Services, you must have a J2EE application server such as Macromedia JRun installed. To learn more about Contribute Publishing Services, including how to install and configure a Publishing Services server, see the Contribute Publishing Services website at www.macromedia.com/go/cps.
Example role assignments As an example of roles you might create, consider an online magazine. The job functions associated with producing a magazine include a publisher, managing editor, copy editor, writer, and web designer. In addition, Contribute adds an administrator to maintain the magazine’s website. Each role reflects separate access to article creation, approval, editing and deletion, page design, and site maintenance. The following table describes the roles and privileges related to Contribute.
Related topics: • “Understanding network and server permissions” on page 9 • “Secure FTP” on page 14 • “Contribute user roles” on page 17 Web page rollbacks Rollbacks let you revert to a previous version of any published web page, providing you with a level of file recovery. You do not have to roll back to the last published version; you can select any version that Contribute has saved as a rollback file.
In particular, you might want to block HTTP access to the MMWIP folder. The MMWIP folder contains interim drafts of files (works in progress) that you might want to protect. Macromedia recommends that you restrict access to the MMWIP folder so that only members of your organization can browse files within that folder.
Other web servers If you are using another vendor’s web server, refer to the documentation supplied with your web server software to learn how to prevent users from accessing specific folders and files. Staging servers and Contribute If you use Contribute to update information published to a website that is accessible to the public (not protected by a firewall), but need to ensure that temporary drafts of pages and user information remains protected, consider using a staging server.
Related topics • “About creating and sending connections” in Macromedia Contribute Help. • “Sending connections for non-managed websites” in Macromedia Contribute Help. Deploying Contribute across an organization Macromedia uses an extensible installation application that lets you install Contribute to multiple Windows computers within your organization.
The following figure shows an example of a file sent for approval, and the files and folders that are created when you send a user of your website a page for their approval.
This figure shows the main folders and files that are created when you enable approvals for a given site and a user sends a page for review. The folders created for approvals are as follows: _mm/ct2004/messaging/users contains a folder for each user for whom approvals are enabled. Each user folder is populated with a series of XML files that identify what drafts the user has within the system. In the previous example, the file notifyWIP.jr615v2v4p.
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.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Web designers use CSS to specify formatting rules that can be applied to text and other design elements in a web page. These rules—called CSS styles—can be defined within a page, or in a separate style sheet that can be applied to multiple pages (or templates on which multiple pages are based). This makes it easy to apply styles consistently throughout a site. Contribute recognizes CSS styles attached to a page and lets the user apply these styles.
Templates in Contribute To be used in a Contribute site, the Dreamweaver template files, identified by the .dwt file extension, must reside in a folder named Templates in the root folder of the website (for example, /Templates/contactPage.dwt). When you create templates in Dreamweaver, they are automatically saved in a Templates folder, but you need to publish the folder to the web server.
Dreamweaver library items must be stored on the remote server and located in the Library folder. The Contribute administrator can set library files as locked or unlocked shared assets. A locked library item cannot be edited in Contribute; unlocked library items are editable in Contribute when inserted into a draft. In Dreamweaver, a user can detach library items on the page. But in Contribute, the administrator determines whether the library item should be locked or unlocked for a given role.
Contribute Publishing Services Contribute includes a suite of optional service applications that let you add functionality to your website. Using these applications, you can more easily manage Contribute as well as provide additional functionality for Contribute users. The applications are as follows: User Directory service lets you integrate Contribute with an LDAP or Active Directory service, or create a file-based user directory so you can easily manage users and their access to websites.
Use the information in this section to help you determine where to create the shared settings file for the following common website structures: Simple intranet website Typically, this is a website where users have read access to the root of the site and read/write access to specific folders in the site as controlled by the file server or network permissions. There is a single root folder and all users access the site using the same Contribute connection.
It is important that the Templates folder, which is located at the same level as the Contribute shared settings folder (_mm), is accessible by all users, and the site’s CSS (CSS folder), and server side includes (SSI folder) are protected by role settings that restrict access to those folders. Web pages and associated files stored in these folders cannot be edited using Contribute, preventing them from being inadvertently modified or damaged.
Users can browse the entire site but are restricted to editing within their department’s folder. By restricting user’s editing privileges to their department’s web pages, each group can maintain control over their web content and can act more independently with the content they make available to the entire organization. A potential drawback to this arrangement is that users in different departments cannot collaborate on pages. Each department must work independently.
Unlike sites that don’t use Publishing Services to manage users, the User Directory does not create an administrative file at the folder level to which you limit access. Instead, the User Directory stores and maintains all user and connection information. When a user logs in, the User Directory retrieves the connection information associated with that user, and provides access to the sites the administrator has assigned.
Likewise, web designer Laura Logic and Contribute administrator Jah Wobble have access to all sites. As the web designer, Laura provides templates that are easy to add content to, and that fit the needs of users collaborating internally. The templates she maintains include those for taking meeting minutes, for scheduling, and for providing product specifications, marketing launch plans, and sales projections, to name a few.
In regard to Contribute, the use of a staging server lets you copy only folders and files that you specify as necessary for your website. This lets you use Contribute to update web content on the staging server, but only publish the necessary web pages to your production web server for public access, providing an extra measure of security by not copying Contribute’s administrative files and folders to your production server.
_baks archives rollback copies of files. _notes contains design notes. These files record information about who last published a given page, and other information MMWIP contains drafts of pages that have been sent for review but have not yet been published to the site. Keeping these folders, and the files that Contribute stores inside them, off your production website provides an additional level of security.
INDEX A administration settings, about 10 administrator responsibilities 6 Publishing Services case study 32 E-mail Notification service 29 Log service 29 User Directory service, about 29 C Cascading Style Sheets about 26 connections about 12 SFTP 14 WebDAV 15 Contribute Publishing Services.
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