Well, it just can’t be avoided, we’re always on the lookout for a new way for a new day, right?
So, it’s like this: There I was, clicking in my start menu, and I clicked the wrong icon, and up comes Adobe Contribute. Yeah, Ok, I’d used it before, quite a few years ago by now, and it had never been received with very much love from the people that I might have expected to be the actual end-users of it. In almost every case however, it worked out to be too difficult and/or too expensive for all parties to come together and use it.
But here I was looking at a whole new version, all these years later, and after poking at it with a stick a few times I notice that it has this “connect to blog” feature… and that WordPress is listed in the drop-down menu! Well all right, let’s take another look at this!
WYSIWYG editors are more and more available in readily available dynamic website products, but they leave so much to be desired! The great temptation for using Contribute, then, would be to have a visual editor that is as good as DreamWeaver, as the editor control for a blog… Could it be true? What are its drawbacks, they’re there, I know they are!
Pros
Well, I’m able to write this post right now, and I’m using it, so I was successfully able to login and edit a basic post. Not bad, editing is natural; you see the whole page in more or less WYSIWYG, ie, the headers, banners, sidebars, footers, etc., are all there, but you can only edit the relevant portion of the page that is there for you to edit. Inline spell-checking is also working.
Cons
Image handling is kind of chunky, and this could be a problem right up front.
I see that for each page you have the ability to use Contribute like a web browser and use the built-in functionality of WP to edit the page, or just click the Edit Post button in the upper left provided by Contribute, and you’ll get the editor from that.
Another problem that I had was that this was the only blog that I was able to connect to. I have several WordPress sites, and of the others I have not had any success yet. WordPress versions, or a plugins and their versions, I suppose, is where I’ll have to look for a solution. For these sites, when I try to connect, I just get a quick rejection, even though I know all the info is correct.
Aha, I have solved the above problem! Apparently, you need to go into your Word Press settings and turn on XML-RPC under the sub-heading of "writing". After doing this, I have had NO problem connecting to my blogs!
So, I have it all working, what have I gained? A slightly better WYSIWYG editor for my blogs. Slightly. Which is to say that while it does not have as advanced of image editing, it does not insert dead paragraph tags all over the place either.
If you already have Contribute, and are sick of the common editors for your WordPress site then you may want to give it it a try. If you don’t already have Contribute, it’s a hard decision to say whether or not it would be worth it for you to purchase it just for this purpose. Probably not, though!
Feel otherwise, or did I miss something important? Feel free to leave a comment below!
