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Contribute Article

 

Integrating Contribute Publishing Services with ColdFusion


Mark Stanton

Mark Stanton

www.gruden.com

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Structuring the Sample Application
  3. Setting Up a Dreamweaver Template
  4. Building a Basic Search Service
  5. Setting Up Contribute Publishing Services
Created:
22 November 2004
User Level:
Intermediate

Macromedia Contribute 3, released in August 2004, has stayed true to its core purpose: making controlled web publishing insanely easy and accessible. However, it has also introduced many new features including the Macromedia Dreamweaver Design view rendering engine, the Macromedia Fireworks image manipulation engine, and Contribute Publishing Services. Most developers have heard of the new Macromedia Web Publishing System (WPS), but not many people have realized that you can integrate Contribute with your own, home-grown server-side functionality without having to install or use WPS.

In this article, I step through the process of setting up a Macromedia ColdFusion search interface and integrating it with Contribute 3 using Contribute Publishing Services to update the search index whenever a user changes to a page in Contribute.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Contribute 3

ColdFusion MX 6.1

Dreamweaver MX 2004

Sample files:

Prerequisite knowledge:

You need to have a basic understanding of ColdFusion, Verity, and ColdFusion components (CFCs). If you need more information on ColdFusion, check out the ColdFusion Developer Center.

What Are Contribute Publishing Services?

With Contribute Publishing Services, you can configure Contribute to send SOAP messages to a predefined web service URL when users perform certain actions within Contribute. For example, when a user clicks the Edit button in the toolbar, the edit() method is invoked and information is sent through SOAP to the web service URL. This information includes who the user is and what they are editing.

Contribute Publishing Services open up a whole range of new possibilities for Contribute-based sites. Developers are no longer restricted to static HTML publishing. Now, you can integrate dynamic server-side functionality such as structured navigation, syndication feeds, and search into Contribute sites without adding complexity to the editing process.

Furthermore, because Contribute Publishing Services are based on SOAP web services, you can use a range of server-side technologies such as .NET, Java, PHP, and Perl to receive and process the messages. In this article, I use ColdFusion MX but the concepts are fairly generic and you can adapt them easily to other languages.

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About the author

Mark Stanton is technical director at Gruden, a web development firm based in Sydney, Australia. Mark is an Internet generalist whose interests cover a broad range of web-related technologies and languages on both the client and server. Mark's experience and interest in Macromedia's offerings range from server-side tools such as ColdFusion to client-side authoring tools such as Contribute and Dreamweaver. As cofounder of the internationally recognized Web Standards Group, Mark is a bit of a standards nut. He has helped foster a strong community of standards-oriented developers in Australia and has presented at key industry conferences, most recently at the Web Essentials 04 conference in Sydney, Australia.