WordPress 2.3 feature overview

Aaron Brazell of b5media has done a fantastic roundup of the new features in the just-released WordPress 2.3: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.3.

Lyceum 1.1 will be parallel with WordPress 2.3, and we can’t wait to have these great features at our disposal.

Lyceum 1.0 Release Candidate 3

It’s been a productive week for Lyceum 1.0. In the time since Release Candidate 2 was announced, we’ve squashed a bunch of bugs, including a particularly nasty one with the help of mod_rewrite guru Justin Turner.

Check it out from subversion, or get a .zip at the bottom of this page. Let us know if you find bugs or have suggestions (how to submit a ticket).

Calling for your Letters of Support

The Knight Foundation has created an innovative grant program known as the Knight Foundation News Challenge. Through this program the Knight Foundation seeks to fund development of open-source technologies that create a sense of connection in communities. As Lyceum is designed to facilitate blogging and news-sharing in communities of any sort, we feel that we’re well-suited for this grant proposal.

Under active development for close to three years, Lyceum is preparing to release its 1.0 version. Along the way, hundreds of communities have tested Lyceum, and our support community has grown substantially. With this Knight Foundation grant, we will be able to take Lyceum development to the “next level”, by employing a full-time developer, as well as supporting a hosting platform at ibiblio. Of course, Lyceum will remain free, open-source and focused on developing enterprise-class technology to facilitate community blogging.

We write to ask that you support us as we seek support from the Knight Foundation. To do so, we ask that you write us a “Letter of Support.” A letter of support affirms the value of Lyceum and its ongoing development, its quality and worthiness of funding, and any other nice things you can think of. These letters will be very important in the committee’s decision, so we ask that you please consider writing one for Lyceum. If you’d like to write a letter of support, we ask that you do so by October 10, 2007. Please send it directly to Fred Stutzman, project manager, at fred@metalab.unc.edu. Thank you very much for your help and assistance, as always!

Lyceum 1.0 Release Candidate 2

Lyceum 1.0 development continues to hurtle forward. Last week, RC1 was announced on the lyceum-users list. We are now happy to announce RC2. Check it out from subversion, or get a .zip at the bottom of this page. Let us know if you find bugs or have suggestions (how to submit a ticket).

MarsEdit

The nice folks who make the fabulous blog-from-the-comfort-of-your-desktop XML-RPC client MarsEdit were nice enough to give us a free license so we could test compatibility with Lyceum. Thanks!

Lyceum 1.0 is coming

You heard that right. Lyceum 1.0 is on its way. It looks like it will arrive sometime in mid September. Things to look forward to:

  • Synchronized with WordPress 2.0.11
  • Vastly improved interface for assigning permissions to users
  • More complete set of system-admin tools for creating and deleting users and blogs
  • Performance optimizations, some of them very significant for large installations
  • Even greater plugin and theme compatibility with WordPress
  • Refined admin interface layout

Stay tuned.