After 3 years of development (the project started in november 2005) and nearly two years of testing in production, zena is finally ready to go public !
Some of you may wonder why a big project like this CMS (or should we say Content Management Framework ?) took so long to be announced publicly. The reason stands in the nature of the templating language used (zafu). This is a totally new “programming language” based on xhtml and it needed quite a lot of refactoring to come to where it is now. Having lots of users using this unstable language would have created a lot of confusion and frustration. Very often, as the language evolved, I had to manually update the templates for the websites running in production. This is something you cannot ask from end users.
Zena is targeted at the designers/developers who need to produce fully functional websites with publication workflow, access rights, easy content editing for customers in a very short time. It’s also a tool with which websites can be very easily adapted to new customer/user needs.
This is a wide project with advanced features on which I have been working alone in my cave for a long time (in web development time). Now that it has reached suffisant stability, I hope to find other designers/developers interested in the development of this tool.
There is an authors page just waiting for new names !
Have a look at the videos or zafu tutorials to start with. You can then go deep into the details of zafu, the templating language.
Gaspard Bucher
comments
Very interesting product! I will keep my eye on this.
By the way, “peaceful” is spelled with one L. Also, for a peaceful CMS, it is quite surprising to see a bomb icon with a lit fuse :)
Oouups.. Thanks for the comment, I corrected this.