This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Apache Lenya
I attended a presentation of Administrative Computing's Lenya installation.
Lenya is a content management system. Administrative Computing needed a system to manage their documentation - lot's of SAP documentation, plus new documentation for the new payroll system they will roll out in January. They used the report from IS&T discovery project on content management to narrow their choices down to Lenya and Macromedia Contribute. They chose Lenya because it is web based, and has an open source license. They are not rolling it out as a service outside of IS&T, it's just a way for their documentation staff to maintain web pages.
Lenya uses Cocoon and XSLT. All of the content is stored in XML files in a file structure - there is no database. Lenya isn't a big fancy repository, the presenter referred to it a s a "file munger." That simplicity is very nice - it's easy to back up or reuse a directory of XML files.
Lenya has three roles: Editor, Reviewer and Administrator. In general Editors are writers who can modify the content of the site, and then submit for review. The review then decides whether to publish. One person can be designated both an editor and a reviewer.
They hired a consulting company (Coyne Consulting) to help them modify Lenya so it uses Certificates for authentication. they also replaced Lenya's built in search engine with Google.
It editing mode Lenya's UI is a thin bar with 4 dropdown menus. The website navigation, and links are fully functional. When you click edit you have the choice between a couple editors, but with the BitFlux editor you can edit the page directly on the screen. Very slick DHTML work.
Another nice feature of Lenya is that it will publish static sites via FTP (or SCP) to AFS lockers. So it's good solution for groups that want to maintain sites within web.mit.edu.