One of the less - ballyhooed program in the newly announced Creative Suite , Adobe Contribute CS3 set aside business users and other non - clothes designer to edit out existing Web pages make in Dreamweaver or other design shaft , although you ca n’t use Contribute to create a new site from loot . Contribute is complete for allowing users to add contentedness to a Web web site , without the possibility of incidentally breaking the site .
In terms of raw feature , Contribute CS3 is a relatively pocket-sized revision to the old version , Contribute 4 ( , January 2007 ) , which was released just last fall . The big changes with this interlingual rendition are found under the hood , resulting in notably better operation across the board .
What’s new
New integration with Adobe Bridge — the Creative Suite ’s file - management tool — allows you to use Bridge to sweep up and send away images and other medium into your draft pages . Unsurprisingly for an Adobe product , there is now good integration with Acrobat files ; dragging a PDF into Contribute gives you the option of either create a link to the PDF message or embedding it in your draft Web page .
Contribute 4 introduced the ability to use Contribute as a web log editor for most democratic blogging chopine . In Contribute CS3 , blog redaction is now WYSIWYG , and the course of study caches the template for your blog so that you’re able to source blog entries offline using your own guide . If you use Firefox 2 ( or Internet Explorer 7 on Windows ) , Contribute cater a new toolbar with buttons that allow you to edit the varlet you are browsing , or to quote its content to a new web log Wiley Post . So far , there ’s no standardised feature for Safari .
Contribute CS3 improves the ability to edit blog post on a variety of popular blogging platforms , including Blogger , WordPress , Typepad , or ( as shown here ) Movable Type .
What’s improved
The swelled improvement is that Contribute is now a Universal Binary , which immensely speeds up the program on Intel - based Macs . Because Contribute needs to link to your Web sites when it launches , the program has always started up rather tardily , and operations that require transactions with your Web server , such as make a new draft Sir Frederick Handley Page , scrub an unneeded draft , or save change to the server always want a significant postponement .
In my preliminary testing with the genus Beta , Contribute CS3 on a 2GHz MacBook found three time faster than Contribute 4 running on a Dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 . Creating a selective service of a complex page was also prompt than in the late version , though the improvement was not as marked . Canceling drafts and publishing edited Page to the site are also significantly faster . In ecumenical , most operation feel natty , whether you are interact with the Web host or not .
chip in CS3 shares the improved Sir Frederick Handley Page - rendering locomotive acquire for Dreamweaver CS3 , so it displays CSS on Web page with much better faithfulness . fork out now complies with the CSS 2.1 measure , which is support by all the major web browser app , check that your drafts in Contribute will await much the same across all browsers and platforms .
What to expect
Because my testing was performed on a prerelease version , I ’m expect even better carrying out from the finalized Contribute CS3 when it ships next month . I ’ll describe my benchmarking results and go into more detail on the other improvement in my forthcoming full review . But establish on the genus Beta , my initial opinion is that Contribute CS3 is the revision that Contribute 4 should have been .
[ LongtimeMacworldcontributor Tom Negrino has written books on Contribute and Dreamweaver , include the good - sellingDreamweaver 8 Visual QuickStart Guide(Peachpit Press , 2006 ) . ]
