Kenesis is pronounced like "kinesis", as in telekenisis or pyschokinesis.

Kenesis was developed in response to the many clients who have been abandoned by their webmasters and hosts, or do not have large budgets for web site development. The emphasis of Kenesis is on low cost, rapid deployment plus an easy learning curve when it comes to managing content.

The only prerequisite to using Kenesis is that your server run Lasso Pro. Lasso  is a commercial product from LassoSoft. Lasso is a lesser known, but extremely powerful "middleware" platform like PHP, ASP, JSP, Cold Fusion, etc.

MySQL, the database that contains the site page information, is an open source database engine that runs on any platform.

The page editing capabilities of Kenesis rely on the open source HTML editor FCKeditor , the world's most popular utility of its kind.

There are many web host providers who support Lasso Pro. Lasso Pro is also relatively inexpensive if you choose to use Kenesis on your own in-house server.

The Kenesis team can be hired on an hourly basis to help you deploy Kenesis, create a new style, or migrate your current site onto the Kenesis platform on a Lasso server.

Kenesis incorporates the best features of many popular open source CMS systems. It has the simplicity of systems such as CMSimple combined with the advanced styling and content controls like Mambo, Joomla, and TextPattern. We've studied and used many CMS systems, putting together a list of best features.

One of the best features of CMSimple is it's "on the fly" editing mode. You can be looking at a page, decided you want to change it, quickly logon from that screen and make the edits. This is highly intuitive. The problem with CMSimple is that its page organization method is not intuitive. One creates pages in CMSimple by applying header styles to a particular line of text. If you're not precise in the way you apply the style, the pages can get jumbled or lost entirely. It's also difficult to re-order the pages.

Kenesis uses the "on the fly" editing and administration mode. On any page you can select the edit mode and immediately make the change. From the edit mode you can switch to the Administration mode and make styling and site map changes.

Page creation and management in Kenesis is intuitive and flexible. In the Administrator mode, the entire site map is displayed for you. You can create new pages within any section at any time, or add additional pages to an existing section. If you want to change the sort order of the pages, simply select the page and increase or decrease the page number.

Kenesis supports the "publishing" principal of displaying pages to the general public. Pages are not visible until they have been marked as published. You can edit unplublished pages until they are ready for publication. Unpublished pages are displayed in the Site Map in the order they will appear when published. Unpublished pages are easy to identify in the Site Map.

When you delete a page, it is deleted foreever. Kenesis doesn't store deleted pages. (If you wish to make a page invisible, you simply unpublish it.) However, when you do delete a page, there may have been children and grandchildren pages of the parent page that was deleted. These "orphaned" pages get moved to the orphaned page list where they can be adopted by new parent pages later on. Adoption reassigns the page placement automatically depending on the hierarchy of parent pages that were selected as adopters.

Obviously the ability to edit a page is protected by an account login, similar to the way Wikipedia handles contributor access. Kenesis supports unlimited contributor accounts and tracks the changes they make.