alternative to contribute

I'm a bit confused about what you're talking about. Are you referring to Macromedia's Contribute - the web editing software? That's not really a "Content Management System" ... or are you using some other acronym for CMS??

If you want a free/low cost WYSIWYG editor you could dtry NVU or Mozilla's composer (one of those is based on the other but I forget which way it goes). Amaya is another good one but it doesn't tend to do well with complex layouts (does great with simple structured text).

Sorry I obviously didn't make myself clear, I am after a free wisiwig editor for clients to edit text and graphics and publish, must be very simple to use.
Macromedia's contribute was very easy to use but I read quite a few negative reports about it so I thought an open source option might be better as it tends to be constantly reviewed and updated. I shall take a look at NVU.
By the way why is contribute NOT a content management system?
Many thanks.

The best thing about Contribute is that you can manage different people editing the site and put some controls in place so people who don't know what they're doing don't screw anything up. It would be great if you, as the designer, wanted to prevent your client from changing certain things or doing things like putting in Font tags etc. I don't know of any other software that has the reviewing features like Contribute if that's what you need.

What negative thigns have you heard about contribute? We use it here a little bit but I am the admin so I don't do a lot with it myself (I use Dreamweaver). I definitely like Contribute a lot moe than the open source solutions available. The quality is much higher. Usually I'm a proponent of open source but I found that Nvu was a bit annoying to use and the quality of code isn't always the best. I've only used that one very briefly though. Having seen it, though, I would say that Contribute is a much better solution for non-technical users, especially since you can lock down parts of the page and prevent them from doing certain things. It's also much easier to use since it works a lot like a traditional web browser. The biggest disadvantage it has is that it's not free.

A 'Content Management System' is usually an automated, web-based tool that helps you to organize content. Drupal or Joomla would examples, if you're familiar with those. They usually don't consiste of static web sites, but rather as information stored in a database that is then pulled into web pages as needed. Contribute/Dreamweaver are just tools to manage traditionally-built web sites with static web pages. That's my understanding - maybe yours is different?

karmaman wrote: By the way why is contribute NOT a content management system?

In the same that a car is not a bicycle, it's just not. It's an editor, it makes changes to the HTML code of a page. A CMS is a 'Content Management System' and consists of some scripts which help you manage content in a structured manner.

I can see where you've gotten mixed up: at first glance the two are very similar things, but really they're completely different. CMS usually contain an editor, often a WYSIWYG one too, Plone has a very simple, yet powerful, editor. Seems to me that you're looking for is an easy-to-use editor for simple HTML pages though, not a CMS.

If you did decide to use a CMS, try either Plone or Drupal with a WYSIWYG editor (you'll need to rummage a little to find one that's good).