Apache Lenya 1.2.3 released

The Apache Lenya development community is very proud to announce the 1.2.3 release of Apache Lenya after 2 months of development.

Apache Lenya is an Open Source Java/XML Content Management System and comes with revision control, site management, scheduling, search, WYSIWYG editors, and workflow.

Apache Lenya 1.2.3 is based on Cocoon 2.1.7. 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.

Check out the Apache Lenya website http://lenya.apache.org for more information.

The Apache Lenya Community

@RELEASE MANAGER resp. PR SENDER@

Changes in 1.2.3

The full changelog is available at the Apache Lenya website. Some highlights are:

  • Replaced Sitetree with XMLHTTP implementation for greater performance
  • Added synchronization to sitetree to improve stability under load
  • Added caching to default publication
  • Moved to Ant 1.6.3 and Jetty 4.2.23
  • Update link attributes on publish
  • Various small improvements to the asset management screens
  • Do not return an array of AbstractRole to enable implementations not derived from AbstractRole
  • Made FileUser serializable. Patch by Miroslaw Hankus
  • Improved windows installer to make Lenya version more explicit and launch Lenya start page at the end of the install

Changes in 1.2.2

  • Moved to Kupu 1.2 and BXE 1.1
  • Rewrote menu javascript code to avoid crashes on Linux
  • Improved Link rewriting
  • Made images and asset titles visible in the forms editor
  • set the date of publication, the publisher and the date of modification when a document is published
  • Added caching options to default publication
  • Enabled roundtripping of images between BXE and Kupu
  • Added dutch translation for Lenya UI
  • Added japanese translation for Lenya UI
  • Fixed code that tried to delete a file that was still referenced in an open file stream
  • Fixed lenya.bat to no longer display the ASL comments during launch
  • Backported patch to show resource type in the overview tab

Changes in 1.2.1

  • Fixed bugs found by FindBugs (http://findbugs.sf.net)
  • Removed OSCOM publication, which continues to be available from http://oscom.org
  • Rewrote all editor's (forms, form, Kupu, and BXE) save functions to use flowscript
  • Updated Kupu to 1.2 branch and integrated Kupu image drawer and link drawer
  • Updated BXE to 1.0
  • Updated Lucene to 1.4.1
  • Made user handling in the admin area dynamic (http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30231)
  • Fixed HTML validation issues
  • Added Feed download task (http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi?rev=47247&view=rev)
  • Kupu no longer changes the encoding during editing
  • Lenya should now be fully UTF-8 ready; enables round trip editing in the various editors
  • Overhauled the build system (http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi?rev=55445&view=rev)
  • Convert Lenya redirects to use proper HTTP codes
  • Added visibility attribute to the sitetree
  • Made title for assets mandatory
  • Fixed BXE link insertion popup to be properly multi-langual
  • Added i18n to checkout error messages
  • Made Lenya work in a clustered environment
  • Improved validation for asset upload
  • Added support for Microsoft Active Directory authentication
  • Improved LDAP authentication code
  • Lifted 2-letter restriction for language code. This allows to create pages with a language code of zh-tw, for instance
  • Removed HSQLDB from Lenya
  • Improved documentation for BXE, Xopus and Lucene integration
  • Changed text of the login screen to explicitly mention both default users.
  • Removed setLanguageTabs() Javascript function from the site tree. It was no longer needed and caused problems with some language settings.

Features

Editing

  • 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 enforce web site style guidelines. Lenya ships (!!!) with the BXE (http://bxe.oscom.org) and Kupu (http://kupu.oscom.org) editors out of the box. Lenya asset management and link management are integrated inte BXE.
  • 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. It is possible to revert to any previous revision of a page.

Workflow

  • Lenya contains a customizable workflow engine that uses an easy XML format to define workflows. Standard one- and two-stage workflows ship with Lenya. Users can be notified by email about pending approvals.
  • Workflow events such as publishing or deactivating a page can be scheduled.
  • Lenya supports seperate authoring, staging and live areas. For convenience, the staging area is disabled by default.
  • All workflow steps are logged, providing an audit trail.

Internationalization

  • Pages can be created in multiple languages with no impact on your site structure. Lenya automatically displays your page in the default languge if it is not available in a specific language.
  • The Lenya user interface is currently localized in spanish, italian, french, german and english.

Layout

  • The 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 seperation of content and layout.
  • The navigation framework automatically creates navigation items such as menus, breadcrumb paths and tabs. A sitemap can be easily created.
  • Lenya has clean URLs and is thus optimally accessible for search engines.
  • There are no restrictions on the nesting of templates. You can use any template you have defined at any level of your site structure thanks to the URI parametrizer.

Site Management

  • Lenya allows 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.
  • Deleted pages can be retrieved from the trash.
  • Each page can have Dublin Core metadata assigned. Other metadata standards can easily be added if required.
  • Asset management allows you to keep track of images and documents that belong to a page.
  • Link management ensures that internal links are not shown if the target page doesn't exist or the user has no access to it. Link management also warns users about broken links when they publish a page.
  • Lenya checks if parent pages of a page to be published are already live to avoid inconsistent sites.
  • Deployment is flexible: Sites can be served dynamically by the authoring server (for small deployments) or another servlet container. It is also possible to export content statically or to use Apache as a proxy.
  • If used with a reverse proxy, Lenya can be configured to rewrite URLs based on the site structure of the live site.

Security

  • Each page or parts of your site can be protected by SSL. Protect just the parts of your site that need protection for best performance.
  • The Lenya access control allows you to restrict access to parts of your site to members of a group or individuals. You can also restrict specific Lenya functionalities, such as editing, approval or administrative features.
  • Lenya users can be authenticated against an LDAP server.
  • Access can also be controlled by IP ranges.

Misc

  • A Windows Installer makes installation on windows a 3-click process.
  • Apache Lucene is integrated into Lenya to offer full-text and field search.

Under the Hood

  • The integration with Cocoon has been improved. For the next 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.
  • Unit Tests help to discover regressions in the code.
  • A publication API that defines a interface for common CMS operations.
  • A fallback concept allows you to selectively override core functionality in your site where needed. Default implementations are provided for convenience and ease of development.
  • Lenya uses Ant for portable scripting. This allows you to integrate Lenya into your enviroment and accomplish custom tasks easily.
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