Take 5 minutes to help debug Lyceum

I have some exciting news. I’ve been working on Lyceum a lot lately, and have merged in all WordPress code up to 2.0.8 (2.0.9 is coming soon).

This, along with some other recent changes, has been a massive undertaking, and the code has changed A LOT. The new version is now installed on the demo site.

If you want to help make Lyceum better, cruise on over the demo site and try to break something, and then file bugs. Just spend 5 minutes creating, deleting, and modifying all sorts of things.. posts, links, categories, uploads…

http://demo.lyceum.ibiblio.org

No fancy testing techniques needed, just experiment, and if it breaks, file a bug.

Introducing: the Lyceum Forum!

The Lyceum Forum is now live!

http://forum.lyceum.ibiblio.org/

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the forum software discussion. I’m quite happy with Vanilla so far.

The user database for the forum and the wiki are now the same. Accounts created on the forum will work on the wiki.

Special note for users who already have a wiki account: Previously created wiki accounts will NOT work on the forum until they are registered on the forum. You also will not be able to log into the wiki until you create a forum account. What this means: if you have an existing wiki account, you should register on the forum with the same username as soon as possible.

Yahya Hamidaddin’s theme porting advice

Lyceum user Yahya Hamidaddin has ported a couple database-using WordPress themes to Lyceum (themes that don’t use the database need little or no modification). He has been kind to share his experiences with us on the Lyceum wiki, here and here.

Thanks Yahya!

WordPress 2.1
Akismet in Lyceum 0.34

I forgot to mention some big news in the Lyceum 0.34 announcement: Lyceum 0.34 now ships with a Lyceumified version of the world’s best web spam filter: Akismet.

For now, Akismet must be activated on a per-blog basis, and each blog must have its own Akismet key. A page on the Lyceum wiki has more info on Akismet and Lyceum, including how to acquire an Akismet key. Please update the page with your own observations and tips!

Lyceum 0.34

Version 0.34 of Lyceum has been completed. This release brings some support for importing data from other blog systems, and the usual smattering of refinements and bug fixes (some of them rather significant).

Go check it out in the downloads section. Bring problems and suggestions to the email list and irc channel.

Which forum software should we use?

We are going to install forums software for Lyceum. The two that I am considering are PunBB and phpBB, mostly because they are the only ones with which I am at all familiar.

There was some discussion on the lyceum-users list a few months back about forum software, beginning here. Folks mentioned a couple other projects: FUDforum, and Vanilla.

Eventually we would like to synchronize the user databases between the forums, the wiki (MediaWiki), and the add-ons repository (Trac), so if any of the forum software packages are particularly good at at that, let us know.

(Another question is, which url should we use?)

WordPress 2.1 Database schema and variable changes

There’s a post on the WordPress development blog outlining some changes in the upcoming WordPress 2.1. These are all welcome and sensible changes that will be merged into Lyceum when the code is final.

Trac is back, better than ever

The trac service is back, running nice and snappy on its new postgresql backend.

Big thanks to John and Jon (and of course me, John) for making this happen.

Lyceum svn and trac services going offline tonight

We are upgrading and tricking out our trac and svn systems tonight, so they will be going offline starting around 9:30 pm US Eastern time, and coming online many hours later in the dead of the night.