TechNote (Archived)

Customizing the How Do I... panel

Certain elements of Contribute are easily customizable. For, instance, you can adjust the placement of menus and insert your own commands. If you are familiar with customizing and extending Dreamweaver this should be very familiar.

When using Contribute in a corporate environment there will be times when you will want specific instructions or style guidelines available to your Contribute users. With Contribute, you can add them into the How Do I... panel, just like the real help pages.

Note: This TechNote will explain how to set up your page and add it to the Contribute configuration file for display. It assumes that you're a Contribute Administrator and are comfortable with editing HTML and XML code.

Creating the custom page

The How Do I... panel is a series of HTML pages. You can use any page you would like, but keep in mind the limited display area. If you would like to create a page that is similar in look and feel to the existing panel pages, examine the panel pages or even copy items like navigation buttons and place them in your own page. These pages are kept within the Configuration folder, located in:

C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Contribute\Configuration\Content\Tasks(Contribute 3.x Windows)
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Contribute\Configuration\Content\Tasks(Contribute4 Windows)
Harddrive:Application:Macromedia:Contribute 3:Configuration:Content:Tasks(Contribute 3.x Mac OS X)
Harddrive:Application:Adobe:Contribute 4:Configuration:Content:Tasks (Contribute4 Mac OS X)
To study these pages open one of the files in Contribute or Dreamweaver to see how they are built. Generally, the pages consist of tables with no border and a width of 100%. You can link to the task.css file if you want to use the Contribute styles. You can even duplicate a file and customize it to your needs. Looking through the code will show how to customize the navigation icons so you know where they go on the page. Once your HTML page is made, save it to the Tasks folder.

Editing the tasks.xml file

The pages in the How Do I... panel are controlled by a master file called tasks.xml. This file controls what is displayed in the How Do I... navigation. To add new links to the the panel navigation page, tasks.xml needs to be edited with links to the new content.

Open this file in Dreamweaver, or any text editor, and spend a few minutes examining the structure. Compare it to what you see in Contribute, it should be clear what needs to be done. Here is a small sample of the file:
```
 <category name="Get started" id="0"><task name="Contribute tutorial "  id="1"/><task name="Connect to a website"  id="2"/><task name="Navigate to my web pages"  id="3"/><task name="Edit a page on my website "  id="4"/><task name="Become a website administrator"  id="5"/><task name="Acme Co. Style Guide"  id="99"/></category> 
```
Note:<task name="Acme Co. Style Guide" id="99"/> is a customized link which is not part of the original Contribute installation. It is shown here for example.

The first line contains "Get started," which is the title of the first section of the panel. Then there is a series of <task> lines. This is the list of links within the Get Started section. To add the new page simply insert a new <task> line. You can see the Acme Co. line has been added to the task list, as shown in the image.
1. Add a new line to the task.xml file within the category group to which you wish to add the custom page/link.
2. Type in <task name="Whatever you want to display" /> (The id number is not necessary. If you choose to add one make sure that you do not repeat a number that has been used.)
3. Save the file.
4. Restart Contribute to see the link.
5. Repeat as required until you have added your custom pages.
Note: Inserting an image into the page may not appear in the How Do I... panel.

Making a custom group

As you may have guessed, it is quite easy to make your own custom group. Simply make a new category in the tasks.xml file and add your new files to the task list following the steps outline above. The groups are rendered in the order they appear so keep this in mind when arranging categories.

A new group will look like this:
```
 <category name="My Category">
		

	<task name="Style Guide"  />
		

	</category> 
```