Michael Wechner: CMS with Cocoon: Lenya

Raw notes taken collaboratively during the talk.

Demo

Michael starts with a demo

A WebLog in Lenya

  • HTML Form-based editor, basic, "going back" according to him
  • Better editor, bitflux.ch, WYSIWYG, saves using webDAV or POST
  • Or you could use OpenOffice.org, DocDook etc.
  • Explicit publish operation allows for staging IIUC

The Lenya "default publication"

Mentions he doesn't like it very much.

Areas within Lenya

  • Admin Area: manage users, groups, IP ranges etc.
  • Site : manage the site in a tree view
  • Authoring: Adding, editing documents
  • Staging: does not exist yet?
  • Live : the live site

Lenya Publications can be hierarchal, but do not have to be.

Sample Lenya publications

The Weblog, Default, Lenya documentation, OSCOM site and a fifth one are distributed with Lenya.

Architecture

Lenya Core and Lenya Publications.

Core: authentication, workflow, etc., tries to be as generic as possible, merged with Cocoon during the build process. Michael sees the core as a content management framework.

Users can take an existing publication and modify it for their own use by editing the XSLT and/or CSS.

Open-minded Lenya users could post their publications on a website for reuse by other Lenya developers/users.

Lenya Core

  • Workflow
    • Defined in an XML file using a "transitions" concept
    • Can use or define ant tasks
  • Access control
    • Unix-based or sitemap-based, including on-the-fly policy generation
    • Hope to merge this with the main Cocoon
  • Versioning
    • simple system, exclusive checkout, checkin etc.
  • Editor interfaces
    • Forms - based editor
    • WYSIWYG Client-side Javascript driven editor
  • Content Creator / Deleter API
  • Publisher API
    • Depending on requirements, Notifies, Distributes etc.
  • Scheduler
    • Uses Quartz, want to re-use the Quartz block in Cocoon
  • Search Engine
    • Uses Lucene, one index for the authoring area and another for the live area

Lenya Publications

Publications implement custom functionality.

One can either adapt an existing publication or create one from scratch.

Like a WAR file, can be downloaded and dropped into a directory.

Lenya finds publications from a properties file.

Letting each publication have its own build process is on the wishlist.

Ant Tasks

Used as much as possible inside Lenya, for example in

  • Content Creator/Deleter
  • Workflow
  • Publisher

Flow

  • User Management
  • Group Management
  • IP/Subnet Management

Roadmap

  • Consolidation of core features
  • Consolidation of sample publications
  • WebDAV, Atom API, JSR-170 Repositories
  • Multimedia / Data repository (Lookups)
  • Event Calendar Publication
    • Lack of this in Lenya, is a common complaint from customers used to PHP-based solutions

Community

Michael is not happy with the current state of the Lenya community.

To bring more people in:

  • Installation has to improve
  • Sample Publications have to work properly
  • Releases have to happen more regularly
  • Documentation has to be better
  • Leverage

Conclusion

  • A lot of work
  • Many Fights (on the mailing lists)
  • ..no regrets

Q & A

Stefano: A lot of people ask him about Lenya. How much work is it to manage Cocoon's documents in Lenya? Using forest as a front end Michael: Pro. Lenya is customizeable to many needs.

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