Thanks for the excellent comment!

I feel your pain.

I am currently Beta testing the Adobe Contribute CS3 product. Can’t talk about the experience, but will once the product is released.

-Brian

I read this review with great interest. I have to read reviews because I can’t get the damn thing to work.

Oh, I got it to install alright. Sort of. Adobe has a really brain-dead bit where they make you actually save the Firefox extension’s XPI file to the extensions directory; since I passed on that, and since Adobe is so clamped-down in its mentality that they can’t imagine doing anything unless they’re doing it the Adobe Way, they don’t make the XPI available in any way except through that installer, so if you choose not to install your Firefox extension right then and there through the user-hostile expedient of copying it to an obscure directory buried in your system user profile, then you are SOL for Firefox.

Which didn’t end up really mattering to me, because I couldn’t make the blogging part of Contribute actually work. Oh, I was able to create a connection after several tries, and after waiting several minutes for Contribute to interact with my blog to get the content types (every other blog editor I’ve tested* does this almost instantaneously). But when I clicked on the link to “escoles blog” on my Contribute home page, it showed me a display that made no real sense in terms of my blog — it looked like a blog page, but there was a weird entry at the top of the page with the title “##TITLE##” and “##CONTENT##” as the body.

That was my first of many “what the hell?!” moments. When I clicked on a link to select a post, the page reloaded with the familiar “You are viewing a page that you haven’t created a connection to.” When I clicked “New…” to make a new, blank blog post, I basically got a page reload.

It looks as though Contribute is still looking at the URLs for some information. That’s wrong. It should not be doing that. If it’s trying to use the MetaWeblog API, it should just bloody do that, not pretend to show you the page in the site. If it relies on the URL of the page, it’s GOING TO BE INCOMPATIBLE WITH ANY BLOG SYSTEM THAT DOESN’T EMBED THE IDENTITY OF THE BLOG IN THE URL PATH. That includes Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, some implementations of MT and WordPress, and for that matter anything that uses “SEO-friendly” URLs.

Now, I really shouldn’t have expected much, and I didn’t. Contribute 3 is a piece of junk, especially on a Mac. The steps you have to go through to upload a file are tortuous; the server interactions are glacial, and the code appears to be single-threaded (at least with regard to the UI) — you can’t do anything at all while it’s interacting with the server. It’s a huge memory hog, is slow as molasses in February. Users love it, for some reason, but that’s mostly I think because of what they don’t know and what we do for them — e.g., we install and configure it on all their servers.

But I didn’t expect utter failure. For me, the software simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t even seem to come close to working. And from what I can see of the way that it doesn’t work, it would be a piece of crap if it did work. They should take a hard, serious look at what MS has done with Windows Live Writer, which is the (free) blog editor for Windows Live. It’s got some serious deficiencies of its own, but what they’ve got works really well, and that may have something to do with the fact that Microsoft now has something that Adobe is conspicuously missing these days: Jeremy Allaire.

So, the short version for me is this: Adobe has done even worse than I would have expected of them if I looked at Contribute 3. I expected crap. I got something that’s just impenetrable.

Here’s the part that really frosts me: Because Adobe is the 800 1600 pound gorilla, I’m going to have to produce a detailed rationale for why I don’t specify Contribute as the blog editor for one of our clients. They have some content in a meta-weblog compliant CMS (Drupal) and some in a Dreamweaver-template-driven HTML site, and Contribute (if it worked for blog editing) would be a one-stop solution. So now they’ll have to use two different pieces of software to edit their sites.

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* By my reckoning, I’ve done reasonably comprehensive tests of seven (7) other blog editors at this point, mostly on Windows — I’m counting Ecto twice, since the Windows and Mac versions are quite different, and not counting RocketPost Express since it’s absolutely useless.

I hear you and completely agree.

Adobe Contribute is simply not a bloggers tool in its current incarnation. It may be trying to be all things to all people and failing at all of it. I don’t know - I didn’t try to use Contribute for anything other than blogging.

As for why big companies end up releasing flops? That one’s easy.

Let’s start with the fact that Adobe is one seriously good software development company. They really do have some of the best software designers, developers, architect, and product managers at the company.

But, if you create enough products, some of them are bound to miss the market - either with poor timing, or poor quality, or poor integration, or lack of features, or poor usability, or poor performance, or too expensive, or crappy support, or … You get the idea. Writing great software is hard.

Adobe is darn good at it, though. Most of the time.

The other thing that big companies have that startups don’t is the patience to keep plugging away at a software product until it is great. Listening to customers, revising, improving. Eventually, sometimes, they get it right.

Microsoft is king at that.

Anyway, enough of my rant. Thanks for the feedback!

-Brian

I was able to pull in an image. But it said it was to big and I needed to edit some file to allow bigger images. But it didn’t tell me if that file was a Contribute file or a blog file or where I could find it either way.

Something it is missing big time is the properties tool bar that Dreamweaver uses. So when I went to put a border on the image it was multiple mouse clicks to get to the screen to do it and then it didn’t actually add the border once published.

I went to make a link… Something that is normally very easy in DW. Just select the anchor text and then paste the link into the properties bar. In Contributor I needed to surf some menu screens and then I was able to add the link into a screen of which the anchor text for the menu is Browse to Webpage. Not exactly the text I am looking for when I need to make a hyperlink.

So basically everything I took for granted in DW is now missing in Contribute. So why buy it when most blogging services and software come with their own rich text editor with the same WYSIWG functionality? Also most software like wordpress has an editor that is light years ahead of Contribute when it comes to ease of use!

Live Motion suffered many of the same aliments as Contribute does. They are like twin brothers.

Why would a leading content creation software company create such flops? It is beyond me… Then again, I started using Photoshop back when it was version 3 and guess what? It sucked too back then. Paint Shop Pro has a better and easier interface. I actually got my brother who makes a living as a designer to prefer it over Photoshop for another 2 versions when it came to quick edits.

I hope they get their act together. I tried editing a wordpress blog that is hosted on my own server and it was horrible. A bad joke. Contribute tried to edit basically my entire blog face instead of entries and the entries I couldn’t even edit because I could see when it put them in the window. Basically it couldn’t tell where my added PHP code started and Wordpress PHP code left off.