MACROMEDIA CONTRIBUTE-USING CONTRIBUTE, Use Manual

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Chapter 14 156
About advanced sitewide settings
Depending on how your web server is configured and the complexity of your website, Contribute
may not be able to automatically detect all possible web server configurations. Contribute
provides advanced configuration options that let you specify alternate configurations for your
website’s index files and alternate web addresses.
Note: As with the general sitewide settings, the advanced sitewide settings apply to all users who connect to the
website using Contribute.
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Index files
An index page is the web page that is displayed by default when a visitor visits a website. For
example, if you enter the address http://www.mysite.com/ into a web browser, the page that is
displayed may actually have the URL http://www.mysite.com/index.html.
Contribute includes a comprehensive list of possible index page names arranged in the order
that they most commonly occur; however, you may need to specify exact page filenames and
display order. For more information, see “About web server index pages” on page 156.
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Alternate website addresses
Some websites have multiple web addresses (URLs) that point to the same web pages. These
sites use Domain Name Service (DNS) aliases, which allow several web addresses to refer to a
single website. For example, www.mysite.com and www.mysite.org are technically different
website addresses, but could point to the same website. If your website uses more than one web
address, you must configure Contribute to recognize all of the possible web addresses.
If you don’t configure Contribute in this way, users may try to connect to a website using a
different web address than the one defined in Contribute, which may cause inconsistent or
unpredictable behavior when editing or publishing web pages. For more information, see
“About alternate website addresses” on page 159.
About web server index pages
The index page for a website is the default web page that appears when a visitor enters a website
(such as www.mysite.com) but doesn’t specify a page in the website. A web server can be
configured to look for a page with a particular filename if no page is specified; the most common
default index page filenames are index.htm, index.html, default.htm, and default.html. Consult
your web server’s documentation if you are unsure of the index page filenames that your web
server uses.
In addition to the primary index page filename, most web servers are configured with alternate
index page filenames, specifying pages to be displayed if there is no page with the filename
requested as the primary index page.