Basic concepts of the Lenya-CMS

Contents

  1. Roles
  2. Configuration and Customization
  3. Making content editable

Roles of the Lenya users

All users of the Lenya-CMS have roles assigned to their usernames. These roles are the basis of the authorization scheme used throughout the application. The roles and their respective authorizations are totally customizable through an administration panel.

All roles belong to one of these main groups:

  1. Administrators
  2. Authors
  3. Designers
  4. Publishers

Administrators

Administrators are responsible for:

For most/all of these tasks, specific configuration pages are provided whithin the Lenya-CMS's Administration Block to shield the administrator from the internals of xml/xsl technologies and the Cocoon environment.

Authors

Authors are the users responsible for content creation and management, they use the specific editors to maintain the content in a controlled and consistant way. Typically, authors are never confronted with design choices and/or xml/xsl documents, they only work whithin the Lenya-CMS environment, i.e. a www-browser. The content is first placed in a staging context, waiting for a publisher to publish it so that it can be viewed by external viewers of the publication.

Designers

Designers are users responsible for maintaining the layout and style of the publication. Typically, they work directly with the xsl and css files used to transform the publication for presentation (e.g. in a browser), as well as the required graphic files. All these files are located in a separate branch of the application tree for convenience (see also Directory structure below). To simplify the designer's work, a "publication explorer" could be provided, that helps to navigate the publishing tree (by reading sitedef.xml) and to identify the content files and their structure (by reading the page descriptor files), and that can be linked to any xml/xsl-editor.

Publishers

Publishers are users that have permission to add staged content to the live publication. This role group is primarily introduced for workflow management purposes. In practice, publisher roles will be combined with author roles to model the workflow of the content management environment, allowing for reviewing and editing activities.

Configuration and Customization

All configuration files have their own living spaces both in the generic Lenya-CMS directory and the specific publication directory. All configuration information that is not supplied explicitly in the publication directory is inherited from the CMS directory, where default behaviour is defined.

Making content editable

To edit the content managed by the CMS, several types and brands of editors can (and will) be used. The best way to provide editor connectivity would be to provide an "editor socket", where different editors can plug in. This socket should be generic and as standardized as possible. One way to do this would be to provide an interface based on the MVC design: the content to be edited is presented to the editor as a triplet of xml, xsl and xsd data, representing content, style and structure, respectively. Some more details: