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<h1>Part 1: Understanding Lenya</h1>
<div id="front-matter">
<div id="minitoc-area">
<ul class="minitoc">
<li>
<a href="#history">History</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#approach">Approach to Content Management</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#goodstuff">The good stuff</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#downers">Some downers</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#next">What&rsquo;s next?</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<p>In this first installment in a series of articles on Lenya, we&rsquo;d like to talk about
what Lenya is and what approach it takes in content management, including its
advantages and disadvantages.</p>
<a name="N10011"></a><a name="history"></a>
<h2 class="h3">History</h2>
<div class="section">
<p>Lenya was started by Michael Wechner in early 1999 as a way to document a journal on
pattern formation. From there, he co-started a company called
<a href="http://wyona.com">Wyona</a> which continued to work on the project
until the spring of 2003, where the project was donated to the Apache Software
Foundation.</p>
</div>
<a name="N1001F"></a><a name="approach"></a>
<h2 class="h3">Approach to Content Management</h2>
<div class="section">
<p>Lenya&rsquo;s approach to content management is just that: content management. While
<a href="http://www.textpattern.com/">some</a> CMS&rsquo;s allow users to
change the styling of pages in the graphical interface of the application, Lenya
does not. Some consider this to be a big negative for Lenya, and for a large
institution with multiple designers and CSS developers, it can be. We&rsquo;ve been
finding, however, as just one user that maintains the look and feel of Hiram&rsquo;s
website, this isn&rsquo;t that bad. Instead of working in a webpage to update our CSS, we
just upload it to the server.</p>
<p>Of course, this means that the structural markup for the overall page layout is not
managed in Lenya either, well, at least not through the graphical user
interface. Instead, your page layout is done in XSL files, and when the page is
accessed through your web browser, the content and the XSL template merge and get
transformed into a valid HTML or XHTML document.</p>
</div>
<a name="N1002F"></a><a name="goodstuff"></a>
<h2 class="h3">The good stuff</h2>
<div class="section">
<p>What grabbed our attention with Lenya was how it went about presenting your content
for editing. When you log in to your website through Lenya, you can click on the
navigation in the pages as if you were browsing your website right there. Find
something wrong in the text of one page as you browse? Just go to Edit -&gt; WYSIWYG
Editor and you&rsquo;re taken to a page where you can change the content. Save your
changes, then publish the updated page. It&rsquo;s incredibly easy.</p>
<p>What&rsquo;s also nice is that the foundation of Lenya is built on XML which, of course, is
great news for web standards gurus who will only work with XHTML. By default,
Lenya uses HTML 4.0, but a quick change in one file will switch all your pages to
XHTML Strict. And since it relies on XML, there&rsquo;s no backend database that
manages this: it&rsquo;s all flat XML files stored on the server. Don&rsquo;t get this
confused, however, with having the ability to connect to a database as you would
with any
<a href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>-type language, because Lenya can
definitely do this as well.</p>
<p>And as any good CMS would, information about the pages, like metadata, amongst
other things, can be edited for each page and is kept separate from the content on
the page itself. Lenya utilizes the
<a href="http://www.dublincore.org/">Dublin Core</a> for its metadata
tags in pages.</p>
</div>
<a name="N10046"></a><a name="downers"></a>
<h2 class="h3">Some downers</h2>
<div class="section">
<p>OK, so there are some downers. The terminology takes a bit of getting used to. For
example, &ldquo;assets&rdquo; are documents, images, or anything you want to link to in the
page that isn&rsquo;t text. Some things just don&rsquo;t happen by default in Lenya: they
require some extra programming. For example, say you add a new item in your site&rsquo;s
navigation, but it doesn&rsquo;t have a page on your website, it just links to an outside
site. There&rsquo;s no nice way of doing this in the graphical interface. A login to the
server to edit the publication&rsquo;s sitemap will provide this functionality.</p>
<p>Also, Lenya runs on top of
<a href="http://cocoon.apache.org/">Apache Cocoon</a>, which is not the
downer, but the time required to learn it makes a lot of people give up quickly.
<a href="http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/userdocs/concepts/index.html#Basic+Mechanisms.">
Pipelines</a> are the big key to understanding how a page is created in
Lenya, and trust me, that will take some getting used to when you want to do
something that doesn&rsquo;t fit the general site provided for you as an example. With
that, it&rsquo;s much harder to find a company that will host Lenya for you &ndash; chances are
you&rsquo;ll need to have a server of your own.</p>
<p>One last thing for picky web developers: getting a website to have clean URLs is a
bit tricky. Even we have yet to get this working exactly the way we would like it to.
And with Lenya and clean URLs comes a much more detailed look into configurations
with the Apache web server than you are probably used to, which does take some
time.</p>
</div>
<a name="N1005D"></a><a name="next"></a>
<h2 class="h3">What&rsquo;s next?</h2>
<div class="section">
<p>So, you read the advantages and disadvantages and you want to take the plunge into
Lenya? Good, because in my next article we&rsquo;ll be explaining the methods we took to
get Lenya up and running on our RedHat Enterprise Linux server. Don&rsquo;t worry, you
won&rsquo;t need this specific operating system to make Lenya work. Lenya can run on
pretty much any UNIX/Linux server and (even) Microsoft Windows.</p>
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