Praise and fair criticism for Lyceum

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?


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I may have got it wrong about the users, apologies if I have - can’t really check right now because I don’t have a local install.

With wpmu all the users are listed in a single table, and you can assign everybody to a blog, but it’s also kind of split off. I don’t remember Lyceum being like that. The thing with wpmu is that you can assign any user as main wpmu admin - so now my ’streaky’ user can go into anybodies blog and change stuff, which is useful for support reasons.

Maybe it was because the UI for users was slightly different it just seemed different, again, sorry if Lyceum has all that.

As for the updates, when I was looking I diffed between Lyceum and the latest WP release - probably a bad idea but my reaction was “gulp”, but like you say merge will make life easier. Good new on the updates too.

I really do like Lyceum, wpmu’s tables-per-blog setup scares me somewhat - I honestly can’t see the sense in it, if wordpress.com is set up the same way I can see why they need so many servers.

I’ve still not completely decided yet and I’ll probably give Lyceum another go before we settle one way or the other, if I can still see it’s potential there’s a good chance we’ll run with Lyceum in the end, but for now we’re playing with wpmu for a few days, to see how it works.

Streaky has hit the nail on the head, Lyceum’s biggest flaw is that is trails behind the current Wordpress version.

With the development cycle for Wordpress inceasing will Lyceum be able to keep up? I prefer the ethos behind Lyceum but huge differences in functionality it makes me second guess my decision to use it and also could be a deterant to new people taking it up.

John, it’s great news that big things are coming for Lyceum. But, as an OSS/GPL program, is there some reason why these can’t be discussed here, in the forums, on lyceum-dev, or placed on the roadmap so we can know what’s coming?

Frankly, I’m less concerned with WP integration than I am with seeing any development efforts on Lyceum advancing and trying to sync my efforts with them.

I tried WP MU and Lyceum both when setting up a blogs server here at UQ library. I wish i’d written some notes on how I made the decision but from what I remember, I thought it would be easier to use lyceum as it just seemed to be an extra column or two on one of the tables and then everything is the same as wordpress. I liked the way the plugins worked too (system and per blog) and I think it is relatively easy to hack plugins to be lyceum compatible.

I have to second the notes above on wishing for more current updates, but overall we’ve tried both on sites we’re developing and Lyceum was an easy choice, particularly when working with multiple sites each having its own install of Lyceum, but with an integrated user database (so registration and login are not repeated across the sites).

To use what Streaky says, please, please please don’t let Lyceum development stagnate (or worse, die), as there is a quiet number (if not majority) that love it and are putting its high hopes and future on it.

So, is this project still alive, or what?

It’s alive enough that we’re running Red Hat Magazine on it. :)

Too bad the problems mentioned here are still a reality today… Was kinda hoping for more.



WAIT! If you need Lyceum support, use the email list or IRC channel. If you have found a bug, file a ticket or send email to lyceum-bugs AT lists DOT ibiblio DOT org.

 

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