Adobe Contribute

» see adobe.com/products/contribute as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i did not touch contribute. by the time it shipped on 3 december '02 i was already a computer engineering freshman in ankara, the kind of person macromedia explicitly did not want using it. contribute was the non developer cousin of dreamweaver, sold for ninety nine dollars introductory to small businesses and to the staff inside larger companies who needed to update a website without breaking the html. i used dreamweaver for class projects through '03 and '04 and i still never installed contribute, the product was invisible if you were not its target.

macromedia shipped contribute 1.0 on 3 december '02 bundled into studio mx plus, windows only at first, mac support came in '03. the underlying html engine was lifted from dreamweaver mx so the published pages were valid. the target was anyone who would otherwise email a word document to the webmaster. the receptionist updating a staff photo, the marketing person changing the press release on the front page. contribute let them edit a sandboxed copy of the page in a wysiwyg view and publish to the live site once an administrator approved the changes.

this happened more in the smb web design press than where i was. adobe inherited contribute when it bought macromedia on 5 december '05 for three point four billion dollars, a deal that also rolled flash and dreamweaver and the rest of the macromedia catalogue into adobe. the product became adobe contribute cs3 in '07 and was rolled through the creative suite numbering until cs5 in '10. the last version was cs5 internally numbered as version 6.5 and shipped on 3 october '12. it stayed bundled inside dreamweaver and creative cloud through '13 and '14 even as the writing was on the wall.

this part you had to be running a small business website for, and i was not. on 27 january '17 adobe posted a blog from the dreamweaver team announcing that contribute would be wound down alongside director and shockwave. sales of contribute stopped on 1 february '17, four days later. the user base was a long tail of small business and nonprofit sites that had been using the product for over a decade. nobody migrated them. wordpress had already taken the smb cms slot a decade earlier and the editing happened in the browser now.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

contribute was a small editor application that connected to a website over ftp or webdav. the administrator set up the site connection once, defined which pages a user could edit, what they could change inside those pages. when a contribute user opened a connected site they got a thumbnail view of the editable pages and could click to edit one. the editing view looked like a word document, you typed into the body or changed an image. when you published, contribute pushed the html back through the connection and the live site updated.

the underlying html came from the dreamweaver engine, the published pages stayed valid against the dreamweaver templates the developer had set up. browser plugins for ie and firefox let a user kick off an edit session from a page they were already looking at. contribute supported wordpress and blogger natively, you could post a blog entry without leaving the app. the file management was the developer's job inside dreamweaver, the content updates were the end user's job inside contribute. that split was the whole pitch.

~ the actual end ~

this happened more in the adobe roadmap meetings than where i was. wordpress passed contribute on smb adoption sometime around '10. the wordpress install was free and the editing happened in any browser. the templates lived on the server instead of in a dreamweaver project on a designer's laptop. contribute kept shipping because adobe creative suite kept shipping, the install base was sticky enough that adobe could justify the version increments. by the move to creative cloud in '13 the product had no clear future, it was bundled in the cc subscription but not actively developed.

the 27 january '17 announcement from the dreamweaver team blog framed it as a clean wind down, customers with active perpetual licences could keep using cs5 indefinitely. no new versions would ship and no new sales would close after 1 february. shockwave got the same treatment as director, both were adobe inherited macromedia products with shrinking user bases that the modern web no longer needed. there were no obit posts on the contribute users mailing list because the list itself had been quiet for three years by then.

~ what carried over ~

this part you had to be inside a 2005 marketing department for, and i was not. contribute is the cleanest illustration of a product built for a workflow that the web routed around. the brochureware website that needed a desktop application and a paid licence to edit a page belonged to a brief window between dreamweaver-everything (1998-2005) and wordpress-everything (2005-2015). contribute lived inside that window and never crossed out of it.

the macromedia receipts went to adobe in '05 and the contribute installs sat on smb desktops for a decade after that. the product page on adobe.com finally redirected to a discontinued products listing sometime in '18. cs5 boxes show up on ebay every so often and the install still activates on windows 7 if you have a vm sitting around. the published pages still work because they were just html and ftp the whole time.

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