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The Contribute workflow

Contribute uses a browse-edit-publish workflow to help you easily find the page you want to edit, make changes to the page, and then update the page on your website.

Note: You must connect to a website before you can edit and publish pages on that website. For more information, see Connecting to a website.

Here’s an overview of the Contribute workflow:

1. Browse to a page. Use the Contribute browser to find the web page you want to edit. The browser’s behavior, as well as its look and feel, will be familiar to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and other popular browsers. The browser toolbar has the normal navigation buttons plus a Choose button to help you navigate to files that aren’t linked on your website. You can create bookmarks in Contribute and view your Internet Explorer bookmarks. You can also use shortcuts in the Pages panel in the sidebar to view current drafts quickly.

2. Edit your content. When you find the page you want to edit, click the Edit Page button to open the page in the Contribute editor. Contribute copies the file from your web server and locks it on the server so that no one else can edit the page while you’re working on it.

The Contribute editor works much as a word processor does. You can edit text, images, tables, and links in the page, and you can even add Microsoft Word or Excel documents to your website. The toolbar contains familiar editing buttons, plus buttons for saving your edits until later, canceling your edits, or publishing your edits to the website.

3. Publish the changes. When you finish editing your page, you are ready to publish the page to your website. Simply click the Publish button, and Contribute replaces the existing page on your web server with your edited version so that it is live on your website. Contribute also unlocks the file on the server so that other users can edit the page if necessary.


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