Who You Calling A Jesse?

Contribute is an application that is so easy to use most people probably never take the time to look through the ‘how do I’ section or read up on its features. Rarely will you will run into problems but when you do sometimes it’s just a simple fix and you are done, other times it’s a bit trickier. This post is a collection of common problems and solutions I have had over the past few years as well as a couple picked up from the forum.

General Problem: I can’t connect to my server or Contribute is connecting very slowly or I can’t load my changes onto the server

Solution: Use network I/O logging to log operations and identify problems.

Why? The I/O logging is the first place to look to identify where your problem is occurring. You can quickly find server permissions issues or server speed issues.

Problem: I can’t edit files on the server even though I have it checked out.

Solution: Check to ensure group write permissions exist on the file you are editing. Certain Linux and Unix user set-ups can cause Contribute (and Dreamweaver) to not pick up the users umask settings and the files end up not being group readable.

Problem: I need to edit my source code.

Solution: Many people do not know about the ‘edit in external application’ feature in Contribute. This allows you to edit in your HTML editor of choice and smoothly go back into Contribute to edit the content or just put it back on the server.

Problem: Contribute is not rendering my page properly in edit mode or I want to highlight the places people can edit but I don’t want to use Dreamweaver Templates.

Solution: Design Time Stylesheets – you need to make sure you load the CSS to the server and the Dreamweaver Template itself has it included.

Problem: I need a section of text to have a certain div id or class name.

Solution: Contribute’s application of class or id names to items is stuck with adding them to the tags. So if you highlight a set of text and apply a style it will add that class name to the ‘p’ tags. Try using the library feature to insert a code snip that has the class or id name you want.

Tip: have a design time style sheet that adds a background at edit time so people know if they accidentally remove the region by deleting too much text. They can just insert it again.

Problem: I want to upload different file types to different directories.

Solution: Administer web site, user role settings, file placement.

Problem: I want to modify some style elements on the page

Solution: Page properties allow you to change some basic style elements.