Bloggers will get a boost with the latest version of Contribute, the Web publishing tool released by Adobe Thursday. Contribute 4 integrates blog publishing features into the Web site maintenance and management tool aimed at business users.
Other additions in this major upgrade include unified Web publishing and Flash Video support. However, Contribute 4 will not run natively on Intel-based Macs; it will run using Apple’s Rosetta emulation technology.
In an effort to make it easy to post to existing blogs, Adobe has enabled Contribute to seamlessly connect to some of the most popular blog servers. Currently Contribute supports connections to Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.
“Bloggers with personal and work blogs will be very happy with Contribute 4,” said Marc Hosein, Adobe Group Product Marketing Manager. “We are targeting bloggers that are writing blogs as part of their jobs or business, because we already have a relationship with the admins at many companies.”
Because Contribute integrates with fellow Adobe app Dreamweaver, site administrators can give authoring permissions Contribute users, while maintaining website integrity, and look-and-feel even when multiple authors update content across the site.
“We are in a unique position because we share the same rendering engine with Dreamweaver,” Hosein said. This gives admins control over what can be updated and still have control over the web site.”
Adobe believes that Contribute will catch on with many different types of bloggers because the application can now handle management of multiple blogs. Users at work can update their business blogs and then go home and write something for their personal blogs.
Adobe has also enhanced Contribute’s rich media support, allowing users to drag and drop images, movies, and now Flash video files into Web pages or blog entries.
The changes introduced to Contribute 4 are in line with several trends cited in a recent study by Pew Internet Report. According to that study, 35 percent of the 50 million American Internet users create Web content and 21 percent of people with Internet access at work publish content to the Web.
The practice of blogging also continues to be on the rise, studies show. A Jupiter Research study forecasts that two out of three companies will run blogs by the end of next year—35 percent of the companies surveyed by Jupiter said they would be deploying blogs in the next 12 months.
Contribute 4 is available immediately for Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later for $149. Registered users of qualifying earlier versions can upgrade for $79. Adobe did not say whether or when an update adding Universal compatibility with Intel-based Macs was forthcoming.
This is the first major overhaul to Contribute since it became an Adobe product. The application was among the software that came under Adobe’s ownership when it bought long-time rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion in 2005.