Programming Results

The design worked out fine in the end.  The XML and XSL combination proved an excellent medium for aggregating disparated data structures and transforming them into HTML.  Though there were plenty of gotchas with schema definitions, character encodings, character entities, etc that come with working with XML. 

Macromedia resolved many of the limitations of Contribute 2 with version 3.  These improvements will help us implement user applied CSS better and allow user insertion of library elements.  Their continued development and great sales success with Contribute has made us confident that it was a good choice for the content editing interface.

As the specs for the site changed throughout the development process, the design proved flexible enough to easily adapt to new needs with minimal or no coding of COM objects or ASP.  Most site wide design changes were implemented by simply changing the Dreamweaver/Contribute templates and/or the XSLT.

While we are willing to share our code, it is designed for our particular infrastructure and isn't very well documented.  The HTML design was done for us by the Office of Publications and Marketing, but was modified some to the point where they can not be blamed for any HTML deficiencies.  UIUC Web Services has since released Dreamweaver templates and offered to design college home pages on a limited basis. See http://www.webmasters.uiuc.edu/ for more info.

A much simpler design could be done with no programming at all using Dreamweaver and Contribute with server side includes as Notre Dame and others have done.  However, features such as property and menu inheritance, hooks to dynamic data, and server side browser detection would be more difficult to do with this design.