Adobe's Contribute 4: A kick-ass blogging tool

We've been fans of Adobe for a long time -- their blogging community on Movable Type is a great look inside one of the largest and most innovative software companies in the world, and of course we've worked with their teams in the past to add Movable Type and TypePad template support to tools like GoLive and Dreamweaver.

That's why it was especially exciting to see the announcement of Adobe Contribute 4. (You might remember the tool back when it was still called "Macromedia Contribute".) Contribute's a great web editor that builds on Dreamweaver's HTML publishing engine.

But unlike Dreamweaver, Contribute is designed for regular people to be able to update your website. Hey -- that sounds like blogging! Contribute is now the chocolate to your Movable Type peanut butter.

If you take a look at the feature tour on Adobe's site, there's a movie that shows the rich WYSIWYG editor you can use to easily add content to a blog. But what's more interesting is that you can drag in rich content like Office documents, videos, or audio, and Contribute will automatically do the right thing. Think about it -- if your coworkers want to put a Flash video into a blog post, or if marketing wants to turn an Word document into an update on your site, you don't have to teach them how to bring the content over; It just works.

We're glad to see Adobe embracing the open APIs around blogging, and just as happy that they're using Contribute tool to update their own blogs. Contribute works with all account levels of TypePad, as well as Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise.