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A friend of mine paid a designer to customize a Wordpress theme for her. Instead, he gave her a website that is managed with Adobe Contribute. He says this is better than Wordpress.
I've never heard of Adobe Contribute. Any comments or experience with this platform - or software - or whatever the heck it is...
Info on adobe contribute
http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/
I haven't used Contribute, but it sounds interesting. It won't be any competition for WordPress, though, since it is not open source and not free ($194.99 at Amazon). And, of course, one of the biggest advantages of WordPress is the vast number of plugins available for it. Contribute's only real draw seems to be it's compatibility with Dreamweaver.
I tend to wonder about the future of this product. With free content managers in such widespread use Adobe must be struggling to keep this one in the niche. Consider the fact that few of us have heard of it, too. I wouldn't be surprised if it quietly disappeared in a year or so.
Personally if I wanted a customized WP theme that is what I would want and would pay for. Like Lynn's awesome Blog is a customized WP theme. I do not know about contribute (yet).
I recommend Adobe Contribute to my web design clients who want to edit html static sites of 10 pages or so. It's easier to learn than WordPress (if unfamilar with it), you'll only have 10 pages on the server instead of 100s of WP files, very fast loading time (because so few files) and there's no software to constantly upgrade.
Use a WordPress Blog if you can commit to writing new posts at least 3x/week and want interaction with customers, RSS feeds, etc otherwise it'll join the 1000s of blogs that have died.
Contribute has been around for awhile. As Herman mentioned, using a product like Contribute is best when you have static html sites and want to easily update them.
Because WordPress is a blogging platform that also has pages, plus the added benefit of an RSS feed - I do not agree that Contribute is better than WordPress, merely different. The fact that WordPress is free and highly expandable with plugins - is another plus for WP in my book.
All that said, some folks want/prefer/need to use html sites and if they want to edit those, then a product like Contribute works nicely.