Ver 4: Still no support for Includes or Design Time Stylesheets?

Question

Wow...well, without either of these I can't make use of this
product. I guess I'm confused at what types of users this product
may be marketed toward, although with the amount of focus put on
Blogs and Blogging and lack of focus on requests already made in
this forum for some time I'm getting a better idea. Hey, if they
want to "dumb this down" and make it a price point product that
purposely sits lower on the totem pole than Dreamweaver, then I
think that ought to be made more clear in the marketing materials.
I guess what's frustrating is that it's touted that it "uses the
Dreamweaver HTML Engine" but can't implement a feature like Design
Time Stylesheets? Would this put it too close to Dreamweaver in the
product line? I certainly don't think so but if it did implement
such a feature it would increase the demographic that could make
use of such a great product as many users are not going to rewrite
Includes OUT of their existing sites just to be able to use it.
Most intermediate to advanced designers will almost always,
and have been taught, to use includes to minimize page changes in
multiple places...it's such a common thing to do. But unless an
included page can be edited inline I have no way to turn my users
loose with this app. It seems reasonable to implement Design Time
Stylesheets like Dreamweaver does in which case, the users could
edit the included page directly and at least see it like it should
look with formatting which they can't do now because of the lack of
an applied stylesheet when opening the include file directly.
Do they expect that once we've written a site using includes
we should have our content providers use Dreamweaver? I don't know
about the rest of you but that's asking for a heck of a lot of
trouble turning non-designer/developers loose with
Dreamweaver...even using Templates.
Sorry for the rant, I'm just a bit frustrated as I really
need an app that can let me make use of "Content Providers" in our
company. And don't get me wrong, I'm a long time Macromedia/Adobe
supporter...just hoped something would happen with v4 that didn't
and was pretty sure it would based on user input on this and other
forums.
If anyone has ideas on workarounds for this problem I'd love
to hear!
Thx,
Mike

Answer 1

Hi. I'm going to reopen this thread instead of starting a new
one. Maybe someone here can help me figure out how Contribute can
solve my client's editing woes.
His site is built in ColdFusion, with template information
that's stored in the database for each page. Currently this is what
happens, simplified.
1. User requests /foo.cfm
2. Database looks up header, footer, and template to use for
/foo.cfm, or the page can use "no template" in which case
whatever's in the page gets put between the header and footer.
3. The template or the page will contain one or more
"editable regions", to use a Dreamweaver term. These blocks of HTML
are pulled out of the database, and can currently be edited within
the CMS by a browser-based WYSWYG editor.
The problem is, the WYSIWYG editor in question isn't up to
the task. Contribute seems to be, but I can't figure out how to fit
it into a workflow compatible with this site!
We don't use Dreamweaver and from what I've seen Dreamweaver
templates aren't going to work in this application. It seems that
if you make a change to the template, Dreamweaver has to go and
update all 800 pages that use the template ... ??!? ... if so,
lame.
I don't mind pulling out all the HTML content snippets from
the database and making a "database" on the filesystem of files
that can be edited in Contribute. No problem. One of these snippets
may be a "contact us" box or something that's used on 100 pages
throughout the site, so I'm not going to put stuff like that
separately on every page.
If I do this, though, my snippets when I open them to edit
them in Contribute are missing their CSS. This is because the CSS
is set up in the header file, which is not included in the snippet
HTML, obviously. The snippets also won't have the header and footer
navigation and stuff, but I can live with that.
How can I get the CSS to show up for my client when he edits
the HTML snippets?
The only solution I can think of is to put a stylesheet
include into every snippet, and then pull that out with a regular
expression from EVERY include at runtime whenever I display that
HTML to the end user. Talk about a gross, ugly, non-extensible
hack. Please tell me there's a better way...
Thanks for reading,
- Andrew.