Contribute special files

Contribute uses a variety of special files that aren't intended to be viewed by visitors to your site. These files include:

The shared settings file, an XML file with a name like contribute.xml, which appears in a folder named _mm in the root folder of the site, and contains information that Contribute uses to manage the site
Older versions of files, in folders named _baks (see Enabling Contribute users to access templates without root folder access)
Temporary versions of pages, so that users can preview changes
Temporary lock files, indicating that a given page is being edited or previewed
Design Notes files containing metadata about the site's pages

In general, you shouldn't edit any of these Contribute special files using Dreamweaver; Dreamweaver manages them automatically.

If you don't want these Contribute special files to appear on your publicly accessible server, you can set up a staging server where Contribute users work on pages. Then you can periodically copy those web pages from the staging server to a production server that's on the web. If you take this staging-server approach, copy only web pages to the production server, not any of the above-listed Contribute special files. In particular, don't copy the _mm and _baks folders to the production server.

Note: For information about setting up a server to prevent visitors from seeing files in folders that begin with an underscore, see "Website security" in Administering Contribute Help in Contribute.

If you aren't using a staging server, you may want to manually delete old revisions in _baks folders now and then to ensure that those older file versions can't be viewed by visitors. In some circumstances, you might need to manually delete other Contribute special files.

For example, there might be circumstances in which Contribute fails to delete temporary preview pages when the user is finished previewing; in that case, you would have to manually delete those temporary pages. Temporary preview pages have filenames that begin with TMP.

Similarly, under some circumstances an outdated lock file may be accidentally left on the server. If that happens, you must manually delete the lock file to allow others to edit the page. For information on how to delete the lock file, see Unlocking a file in a Contribute site.

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