Lenya is a Java/XML-based open source CMS that is licensed by the Apache Software License and has functionality targeted for web content management including workflow, separation of content and layout, and access control.

In the words of project founder Michael Wechner, “The idea of Lenya is to offer a CM Framework by enhancing Cocoon, which incubated Lenya prior to release 1.2 in September 2004 by CM components, but also a CMS ‘nearly out of the box.’”

The Lenya project was once hosted by the Swiss systems integrator Wyona. After having difficulty getting people to contribute to the project because of its close ties to a single company, Wyona donated Lenya to the Apache Software Foundation.

This achieved the goal of making Lenya more neutral and increased overall interest in the project. The Lenya project is now a top-level Apache project and it is making great strides towards its original vision.

The largest installation of Lenya is the online version of one of the largest German speaking newspapers in the world: Swiss-based Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ Online).

In addition to NZZ Online, several universities and a few software companies have adopted Lenya to manage their web sites.

While the user interface is a little less polished and sophisticated than some of the other open source CMS, Lenya’s architecture makes it a very good starting place for a custom solution designed to meet a unique set of business requirements.

Content Creation and Editing

In its out-of-the-box state, Lenya uses the in-site editing model where editors and readers have different views of the same site.

The editor/author view has an administration menuing structure at the top of each page, where the user can edit pages, process workflow, manage users, and perform other administrative functions. Lenya ships with two WYSIWYG editors: Kupu and BXE.

BXE works only with Mozilla-based browsers. BXE appears to be a more powerful tool and is integrated with Lenya’s link management functionality.

Lenya’s link management functionality allows the application to be aware of links between content managed pages and to notify the user if publishing or removing a document will result in broken links on the site.

Lenya’s asset management system allows assets (such as images) to be associated with a page so when the page is published, associated content is also deployed.

Management

Lenya contains a customizable workflow engine that uses an easy XML format to define workflows that consist of collections of states and transitions. Standard one- and two-stage workflows ship with Lenya. Users can be notified by email about pending approvals and all workflow activity is logged and auditable.

Workflow events such as publishing or deactivating a page can be scheduled.

The Lenya presentation system maintains separate areas for staging and live so a single server can be used to run the entire application if publishing and viewing loads are modest.

Presentation

Lenya’s presentation system is built on a combination of the powerful Java/XML framework Cocoon and CSS. Cocoon blocks are also available to the presentation template developer for dynamic functionality, such as form handling and personalization.

Cocoon has a powerful new framework called Flowscript, which supports complex transactive functionality such as multiple page forms. For search, Lenya integrates well with the popular Apache Lucene search engine.

Community and Support

Over the last couple of months, activity on the Lenya project seems to have slowed. There have been occasional announcements of new Lenya websites deployed but not a significant amount of new development.

However the community around Cocoon, the technology on which Lenya is based, is going very strong.

The next major release of Lenya 1.4, which will persist content to a Java Content Repository, is still in early Alpha and seems to be stalled.

( Information from Optaros )