Non-Dreamweaver templates for Contribute

Question

Are there any guidelines anywhere for creating the equivalent
of Contribute editable/non-editable templates for sections of HTML
pages which were not created by Dreamweaver; for example,
guidelines on the use of <!-- begineditable--> etc.?

Answer 1

Ian,
The Dreamweaver template system works from the standpoint of
a "deny all, allow some" mentality.
Initially a Dreamweaver template file allows no editing to
any sections. When modifying the template in Dreamweaver or any
other text editor, the addition of the begin/end editable pairs
enables the editing of any content existing within the tag pair.
If you want to create a template for use with Contribute
outside of Dreamweaver just create the file with any editable
sections you desire then change the file extension to .dwt and
place it in the "Templates" directory on your CPS managed
webserver. Any files in the "Templates" directory that end with
".dwt" will be loaded on the next startup of the Contribute client.
By default the Publisher and Writer roles allow access to all
templates in the "Templates" directory via the Contribute client.
Also, make sure that the "whatever" text mentioned by Murray
is unique to each individual editable region.
Please note that the Contribute/Dreamweaver template
interaction is *not* a run-time template system. Dreamweaver
templates are design-time templates. If you have sections of the
template that change later then those changes will need to be
applied on a page-by-page basis to each page using a given
template. This functionality is automatically handled within the
Macromedia workflow by using Dreamweaver to download the entire
site then having it update all pages that are based on a given
template.
The piece of the code that denotes which template is assigned
to a given page is as follows:
<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/level2.dwt"
codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->
with an acompanying closing tag of:
<!-- InstanceEnd -->
The "InstanceBegin" tag should follow the opening html tag
and the "InstanceEnd" tag should precede the closing html tag.
The important piece of the "InstanceBegin" tag is the value
of the "template" attribute. This needs to be the path to the
specific template file relative to the webroot on the server.
Hope this helps.