Google Alerts informs me that someone who goes by Streaky has given WordPress MU and Lyceum a spin, and has this to say about them:
Firstly there’s WP-MU, which is the ‘official’ multi-user code. It’s stable and polished, yet has some issues – the main one for me is that every blog has its own set of database tables. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they did this. I can’t find any official information on it either.
The reasons I’ve seen banded about are that it makes the system more scalable and it’s easier to split sites between database servers. This might be true as far as splitting goes – but scalable? I’m not so sure.
[snip]
The second choice is Lyceum – this is better – sort of. Sites share one set of tables and there’s plenty of indexes – good so far. But wait, what version of Wordpress is it? Something old I can tell you that. This project is dead.
Worse, the global users feature of wp-mu is great, Lyceum doesn’t have that. The other issue is that there is a massive amount of coding is needed every time a new version of Wordpress is released – far more than wp-mu at any rate, which is probably why the project is almost dead.
Streaky is exactly right that our WP integration cycle has become frustratingly infrequent (current point release is synced with WP 2.0.1, trunk is at 2.0.9). This is going to change dramatically in coming months as a result of various projects that are in the works.
Streaky goes on to say that “a massive amount of coding is needed every time a new version of Wordpress is released”. This is actually not the case. Going from 2.0.x to 2.1 is going to take a little bit of thinking because there is some file reorganization. But merging in a minor version is achieved with a very managable merge command, and a little work resolving conflicts. Usually this takes about 2 hours per release.
Regarding “the global users feature of wp-mu”, I’m not sure what he is refering to here, and an initial search didn’t come up with anything that seemed relevant. Could readers familiar with MU fill me in on how this feature differs from Lyceum’s behavior?