Apache Lenya Project Status

Update:  Apache Lenya 2.0.3 was released on January 20, 2010.

I am not at all affiliated with the Apache Lenya CMS project. The extent of my involvement with it over the past year has been compiling it and writing a First Impressions post. The idea I had about deploying it for group/departmental technical documentation has remained only an idea for now due to other projects and issues being a major consumer of my time.

This single first impression post has been around long enough that I get a fairly good amount of traffic to this blog from people searching google for items related to Lenya. Some of these search terms highlight problems that users are experiencing like using lenya with java 6 or creating a deployable war file. Some folks are interested in comparisons, for example, lenya vs. sharepoint, lenya vs. joomla, or lenya vs. drupal.

However, and this is the point of this post, more recent search engine phrases that have brought traffic to this blog are centered around the status of Lenya. One visitor from the UK even went so far to query "Is Apache Lenya Dead?". (I'm not quite sure why this would have brought them to my blog!)

Regular visitors to the Lenya site may have noticed that the header on the site now includes a link to Lenya 2.2. Although not much information is available, Lenya 2.2 will be based on Apache Cocoon 2.2. Reading through the mailing list archives, Apache Lenya development looks to be alive and well but you can't really tell this simply by browsing the Lenya site.

I think there is a lot of interest in this CMS based upon the number of searches that I get from folks looking to get started with Lenya but for each incoming request from people looking to get started with Lenya, there are an equal number of searches from people wondering what is going on with lenya. Below is a short list of some of the things that Lenya users and those considering the use of Lenya are interested in knowing more about:

• Lenya 2.0.X users are interested in using Lenya as their blog engine.
• Lenya users would like to know how they can get Lenya working under tomcat 6 and/or java 1.6
• A fair number of folks want to know how they can integrate Lenya with JBoss
• As previously noted, people considering Lenya would like to know how it compares to other CMS's like Drupal or Joomla (and even SharePoint).
• Users brand new to Lenya are interested in finding information on how to get started. For example, "OK. I've successfully compiled and deployed Lenya--now what do I need to do to start building a brand new site?"
• "Out of the box", what can I do?  What kind of plug-ins are available?

It would be great if any of the Lenya project members who happen to stumble upon this article could post a comment letting us know what the latest news is with Lenya or where we can find the latest news on Lenya.