Is there a system that can produce Web content from several materials and then produce a set of mostly static Web pages that we can deploy to a site hosted by our ISP?
Take a look at Apache Lenya. Lenya is a content management system that uses Apache Cocoon to provide a system that can build Web sites for deployment to third-party hosting sites. Lenya has several life-cycle management features, including document creation, management and WYSIWYG HTML editing support. The executable versions are great for getting started.
For production use, you will want to build your own from scratch. To build Lenya, download the Java source distributions of Cocoon and Lenya from apache.org, and unpack them both to the same parent directory. Build Cocoon first by running the “build” command in the Cocoon directory you just created. Then change to the Lenya source directory and follow instructions in the Install-SRC.txt file, and run the “build” command in the Lenya directory. After that, you can create and edit Web sites by pointing a browser at http://localhost:8888. You then can publish content to a folder and copy the new site to the ISP host.
Blass is a network architect at Change@Work in Houston. He can be reached at dr.internet@changeatwork.com.
