Adobe Contribute 4 is released
Contribute 4 has appeared on the Adobe site today with a couple of articles in the developer center. There are some pretty cool blogging features added that appear to work fine in the most common blogging software (I can’t get it to work all that well in Textpattern) and on Windows. Mac users you will not be happy to hear this is not a universal application and it feels kinda clunky compared to Contribute 3. The MS Office integration features don’t work for Mac users either but its not all bad news…
If you haven’t used Contribute before and you are on Windows, you will like version 4. Especially the publish from MS Word for Windows folks. The blogging features are pretty cool and offer an interesting opportunity outside of just blogging – you could create a XML-RPC link to your database driven content and maybe edit like a blog (haven’t tried as yet). CT3 users might like that a lot as well as the one major feature missing is the ability to edit content stored in a database.
There is a Firefox extension as well but be careful if you have Firefox 2 installed. I haven’t been able to get the extension to work on the lastest Firefox (like many other extensions until recently). The extension installs with Contribute 4 and it goes straight to the latest Firefox version you have. Re-installing it is a pain and I still can’t get it to install of FF 1.5 on OS X.
For the Contribute 3 user that wasn’t longing for better MS Office integration or blogging, you may be left scratching your head. There are some slight improvements for CSS and how it handles includes but overall the focus of this version appears to be blogging. No update for CPS has appeared either. I am still not sure one way or the other with Contribute 4 if it is worth the upgrade. I really loved Contribute 3 when it came out and I was excited for version 4. Perhaps I have yet to find that feature that will make me need version 4…. but I bet those office integration features will be enough for a lot of people to upgrade.