Briefly, this is a client tool as you note, that is designed to work with CMS systems not replace them. For now though the only file transfer mechanism is FTP. The product is extensible though as it is built on the DMX codebase. I think more details on that will come out in time.

Great!

Meanwhile I downloaded and installed the beta and it really looks good. Time to find out more about the DMX codebase!

Macromedia has just announced Contribute, which is not only a web editor "for the rest of us", but especially a tool that allows to separate the designers' from the content amangers' work.

Now, this is what we've been trying to do for the last four years with our technology, also if we've been doing this using a different approach, since what we have developed is a server application, while Macromedia's new tool runs on users' PCs.

I think this is great news for us (and for other content management system vendors) for the following reasons:

• While we were concentrating on the server side of running a website, our editing tools were somehow limited by the fact that we were running our UIs in a browser, which has limitations that Contribute will defintely not have;
• Macromedia has a very good experience on working on html code without making your web pages explode thanks to their Dreamweaver code;
• The fact that Macromedia is entering this market is good news, it will probably help making it "a market".

Am I scared from this?

Nope, a content management system goes much further than updating contents, it allows you, for example, to dynamically create pages that adapt to specific visitors, to manage e-commerce transactions, to render contents into many different forms, so I don't see Contribute strictly as competition for us.

To the contrary, I think that having a high-quality editing tool sitting on our users' desktop can be a huge advantage for us, provided that we can tie into this power. So far I've only looked at Contribute web tour and they say that it can interact with any server via ftp. Well, is there going to be XML-RPC or SOAP support? Is there going to be a way to implement them? If the answer to one of these questions is yes, it's going to be a lot of fun (and business).