Contents

• Summary
• About Apache Cocoon
• About the Apache Software Foundation
• Principal References

The Apache Software Foundation has announced a new Version 1.2.2 release of the XML-based open source Apache Lenya Content Management System. It provides most features one can expect in a modern Content Management System, such as WYSIWYG browser-based editor support, "revision control, scheduling, a built-in search engine, separate staging areas, and workflow."

According to the project summary, Apache Lenya is "an Open-Source Content Management System written in Java and based on open standards such as XML and XSLT. Lenya is built on top of Apache Cocoon and other components from the Apache Software Stack. Its XML-centric architecture allows for content delivery targeted to the capabilities of various devices, and avoids data lock-in. Apache Lenya is built around off-the-shelf components from the Apache Software Foundation."

The Apache Lenya Project project was chartered (1) "to provide commercial-quality, high-performance, well-tested, standards-based XML editing environments that are developed in an open and collaborative fashion, (2) to add user-oriented functionality on top of the Cocoon framework and other Apache projects, and (3) to advance the state of the art of content management and structured text editing."

Apache Lenya is integrated with the Apache Cocoon XML Web Development Framework Project. Apache Cocoon is "a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming."

Because is based on Cocoon, "you can use Cocoon features such as robust Caching, multi-channel output, it's many connectivity options to quickly build customized solutions to meet your specific needs that are not already covered by Apache Lenya today. The integration with Cocoon has been improved in Version 1.2. For the next (1.4) release, it is planned to move Lenya to a block-based system which should make it much easier to mix and match Cocoon and Lenya components. Other feature set objectives in version 1.4 include integration with Open Office, implementation of link management, and multilingual capabilities."

Apache Lenya supports browser-based WYSIWYG editing in the authoring area that "validates input against a Relax NG Schema. This prevents invalid markup as produced by other WYSIWYG editors, and allows to enforce web site style guidelines. Lenya ships with the BXE and Kupu editors out of the box. Lenya asset management and link management are integrated into BXE. BXE uses validation to restrict the editing choices instead of allowing free-form input and then generating validation errors on save. A forms editor is available for situations where a full-blown WYSIWYG editor is overkill or where legacy browsers need to be supported. Pages that are being edited are automatically locked for other users, preventing conflicting changes to the same page. Each edit of a page creates a new revision, and it's possible to revert to any previous revision of a page."

Site management tools in Apache Lenya allow you to "move, copy, rename, archive or delete individual pages or whole parts of your site within an easy to use site view that shows you the pages of your site in an explorer-like view. Each page has tabs for easy access to meta data, assets, workflow status, revisions, access control and scheduling. The archive function allows you to deactiviate pages and store them in an archive, and deleted pages can be retrieved from the trash. Each page can have Dublin Core metadata assigned." This site area interface "is used to perform operations that concern multiple pages, like moving pages around, renaming sections of the site, etc. The site area gives a quick overview of the complete site. Detailed information about each page can be accessed by clicking on the relevant node in the tree structure."

Apache Lenya "contains a customizable workflow engine that uses an easy XML format to define workflows. Standard one- and two-stage workflows ship with the 1.2 release. Users can be notified by email about pending approvals, and workflow events such as publishing or deactivating a page can be scheduled. Lenya supports separate authoring, staging and live areas; all workflow steps are logged, providing an audit trail."

For layout the Apache Lenya publications concept "allows reuse of the information architecture of a site and brings modularity to the content level. Different publications can share content and business logic, and new publications can be created with a cloning process. Lenya supports XHTML+CSS templating, eliminating the need to learn yet another templating language. Wherever possible, Lenya uses CSS for styling, therefore enforcing the separation of content and layout. The navigation framework automatically creates navigation items such as menus, breadcrumb paths and tabs, and a sitemap can be easily created. Lenya has clean URLs and is thus optimally accessible for search engines."

Apache Lenya Version 1.2 is made available as open source under The Apache Software License Version 2.0, conforming to the OSI's Open Source Definition.

About Apache Cocoon

Lenya is built on top of Apache Cocoon and other components from the Apache Software Stack:

"Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming.

Cocoon provides advanced control flow — continuation-based page flow that hides the complexity of request/response processing and is cleanly separated from the view and data components...

Cocoon has been designed to coexist and interoperate side-by-side with your existing J2EE solutions or to give them new functionality without requiring any change in the existing infrastructure. It interacts with many data sources, including filesystems, RDBMS, LDAP, native XML databases, SAP systems and network-based data sources. It adapts content delivery to the capabilities of different devices like HTML, WML, PDF, SVG, and RTF, to name just a few. You can run Cocoon as a Servlet as well as through a powerful, commandline interface. The deliberate design of its abstract environment gives you the freedom to extend its functionality to meet your special needs in a highly modular fashion..." [project web site]

About the Apache Software Foundation

"The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.

Formerly known as the Apache Group, the Foundation has been incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers. Individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software development, through sustained participation and contributions within the Foundation's projects, are eligible for membership in the ASF. An individual is awarded membership after nomination and approval by a majority of the existing ASF members. Thus, the ASF is governed by the community it most directly serves — the people collaborating within its projects... [from the home page]

Apache Projects include: HTTP Server, Ant, APR, Cocoon, DB, Excalibur, Forrest, Geronimo, Gump, Incubator, Jakarta, James, Lenya, Logging, Lucene, Maven, Perl, Portals, SpamAssassin, Struts, TCL, Web Services, XML, XMLBeans, XML Graphics. Among the Apache Web Services projects: Axis, WS-FX, JaxMe, jUDDI, SOAP, WSIF, WSIL, WSRP4J (Under Incubation), XML-RPC, EWS, Mirae, Muse, Scout, Addressing (WS-FX subproject), Sandesha (WS-FX subproject), WSS4J (WS-FX subproject), Apollo (WS-FX subproject), Hermes (WS-FX subproject).

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization incorporated in the United States of America and was formed primarily to:

• provide a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure
• create an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit
• provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects
• protect the 'Apache' brand, as applied to its software products, from being abused by other organizations [from How ASF Works]

Principal References

• Apache Lenya web site
• Apache Lenya Wiki
• Apache Lenya Screenshots
• Download Apache Lenya
• Lenya Development Roadmap "The Lenya roadmap is determined by the Lenya positioning diagram. It specifies the priorities and orientation, and shows areas for futher development. The 1.0 release marks the point where Lenya is donated to the Apache foundation. Subsequent releases are under the Apache umbrella..."
• Apache Pojects closely related to Lenya
• Apache Lenya Version 1.2
• Apache Lenya Version 1.2 JavaDoc
• Apache Lenya Version 1.4 JavaDoc
• Lenya Code change history
• Apache Lenya Project Charter. See also the Resolution for the creation of Apache Lenya Project.
• The Apache Lenya Community. Contributing code, preparing and applying patches, etc.
• Apache Lenya History
• Apache Lenya Licensing:
  • Apache Lenya license. Available under the Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004.
  • Apache License, Version 2.0
  • Apache Licenses
  • Open Source Definition
• Press:
  • Lenya, Open Source Web CMS Updated." By Brice Dunwoodie. From CMSwire (March 01, 2005). "Apache Lenya features WYSIWYG content editing using browser-based WYSIWYG Editors that validate input against a Relax NG Schema. This prevents invalid markup as produced by other WYSIWYG editors, and allows to enforcement web site style guidelines. Lenya ships with the BXE and Kupu editors out of the box. Lenya asset management and link management are integrated into BXE..."
  • "ASF Releases Apache Lenya Update." By Michael Myser. From eWEEK (March 1, 2005). "Apache Lenya 1.2.2 updates and now ships with OSCOM's (Open-Source Content Management's) Kupu, a Javascript editor for Mozilla, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and BXE (Bitflux Editor), a browser-based XML editor, as well as Apache Cocoon, the Foundation's Web development framework on which Lenya is based."
  • "Open Source CMS Edges Toward the Mainstream." By Ron Miller. From EContent Magazine (February 18, 2005). "The number of open source content management products on the market is growing; what separates companies such as Zope, Lenya , eZ publish, and Nuke from better-known counterparts at Documentum, Vignette, and Hummingbird is that the open source products (with a few exceptions) tend to focus solely on Web content management, rather than enterprise content management, but that doesn't mean at least some of them aren't making their way into the ECM space as well..."
  • "The Fastest and Most Reliable Swiss Media Websites Run Wyona." "NZZ Online and Computerworld are two out of the three winners of the Site Angel Trophy, a benchmark comparing performance and availability of Swiss media websites. Both websites run on previous versions of Apache Lenya, the open source Content Management System (CMS) originally developed by Wyona the leading swiss specialist for open source CMS..."
• The Apache Cocoon XML Web Development Framework Project. Apache Lenya is based on Cocoon, so you can use Cocoon features such as robust Caching, multi-channel output, etc. "
• BXE. Apache Lenya supprts the Bitflux WYSIWYG XML Editor. "With the Bitflux Browser Editor you can edit your content semantically and at the same time display it to your users and editors in its final form... In it based upon Mozilla 1.x /Netscape 7.0. BXE works like a Wordprocessor and is usable with any XHTML or XML documents..."
• Kupu. Apache Lenya supports Kupu. "Kupu is a 'document-centric' open source client-side editor for Mozilla, Netscape and Internet Explorer. Inspired by Maik Jablonski's Epoz editor, it was written by Paul Everitt, Guido Wesdorp, and Philipp von Weitershausen... Kupu can be easily integrated into a variety of CMS. Currently there is integration code for Zope 2, Silva, Plone and Apache Lenya... Kupu can be customized and extended in several ways. For simple modifications much of the configuration can be set as attributes on the editor iframe, while buttons, tools and layout can be changed via the CSS. For larger customizations there's a simple JavaScript plugin API, and also the core has a clean and solid architecture to allow full extensibility... Kupu uses CSS in favor of HTML for layout and presentation. It supports asynchronous saving to the server. It sets event handlers from code instead of from the HTML..."
• OSCOM. The International Association for Open Source Content Management. "OSCOM organizes events, promotes standards (WebDAV, RSS, Atom, JSR-170 Jackrabbit Project), and undertakes projects to further the state of the art of Open Source Content Management. OSCOM promotes Open Source Content Management solutions as powerful, affordable and flexible replacements for proprietary products.
• cmsInfo.org. "cmsInfo is an internet community of users and developers of Content Management Systems. Dedicated to provide news and information of the Open Source weblog niche."
• Apache Software Foundation (ASF):
  • Apache Software Foundation Projects
  • ASF FAQ document