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    • CommentAuthorjohn
    • CommentTimeFeb 21st 2009 edited
     permalink
    Hey folks. I recently wrote this email to the lyceum-users email list. For those of you not on that list, or who prefer to use the forum, check it out, and please chime in with your thoughts on the matter. I'm going to keep pushing this dialogue along over the next couple weeks in order to fully explore the community's needs and ideas.

    ---------------------
    Lyceum users,
    Below is an overview of the status of the Lyceum project, and a request for
    feedback from you on where you would like Lyceum to go. If you don't have
    time to read the entire thing, please skip down to the questions at the
    bottom and send some feedback, either to the list or directly to me. Thanks!

    --------

    As many of you have surely noticed, Lyceum development has been essentially
    nonexistent for the last year and a half. The last point release was a
    bugfix in June 2008, which is still working off of the WordPress 2.0.x
    branch.

    The reason for this can mostly be blamed on the somewhat cliché narrative of
    the open source developer getting a job and a girlfriend and letting his
    brilliant project go unmaintained. Another significant factor is that
    Lyceum's primary competitor, WordPress MU, has grown into a respectable and
    consistently maintained project. While users continue to tell me that they
    find Lyceum easier to install and in various ways more intuitive than MU, it
    has more-or-less feature parity with Lyceum...

    ...except, of course, for the database schema. Lyceum's schema is
    normalized[1], MU's is, roughly speaking, sharded[2]. For massive
    installations such as wordpress.com, a sharded schema is preferable. A
    normalized schema is preferable for everyone else. A normalized schema
    offers advantages in performance, ease of upgrades and administration, and
    vast opportunities for developing plugins and features which can access the
    entire set of data in the installation.

    "Show me the last 10 posts across all blogs" is impossible in MU without
    maintaining and accessing a separate, redundant index table at the
    application layer. In Lyceum it is trivial and fast, even for thousands of
    blogs.

    Regardless of these advantages, the effort of maintaining Lyceum must be
    matched by demand. So I find myself at a crossroads, deciding whether to
    pick the project back up, or let MU be the only option.

    So my question to you, users, is this: What value does Lyceum hold for you
    today? How many of you out there chose Lyceum over MU mainly because of the
    schema? What other reasons do you have? What do you like and dislike about
    Lyceum?

    If I choose to resume Lyceum development, here are the two initial phases of
    development:

    :: Phase 1 - simply bring Lyceum up to the current version of WordPress

    I have two options for doing this. The first is to continue developing
    Lyceum as a branch of WordPress. The second, and more likely option, is to
    start from scratch using the WordPress MU codebase, keeping all of its
    features and merely normalizing the schema.

    Either way, I could get Lyceum back on its feet in 2-4 months of
    development. And don't worry: even though the codebase would be wildly
    changed, there would be a fully-supported upgrade path from previous
    versions of Lyceum.

    After getting the codebase contemporary with WordPress, applying future
    WordPress updates to Lyceum would be a non-trivial, but relatively
    straightforward process. I estimate it would take me 5 hours of work per
    week.

    :: Phase 2 - add Lyceum-specific features

    There are two main types of Lyceum-specific features that I would like to
    develop. The first are features which simply leverage the normalized schema
    -- template functions, hooks, utility pages, site-wide feeds... all
    accessing site-wide content in a way that is easy for template and feature
    developers to use without having to worry about complicated denormalized
    meta-tables (or any sql at all).

    The second are features which evolve Lyceum into more of a foundational
    social platform, connecting content, users, and their online publishing
    presence in an intuitive and ergonomic way.

    I could go on and on about even more things I would like to add to Lyceum --
    the main theme being seamless integration with other platforms, frameworks,
    and architectures.

    I'll stop here and let you folks respond. Here are the questions I mentioned
    above:

    - What value does Lyceum hold for you today?
    - Did you chose Lyceum over WordPress MU mainly because of the schema?
    - What other reasons do you have for using Lyceum?
    - In general, what do you like and dislike about Lyceum?

    Thanks for any and all feedback, and thanks for using Lyceum!

    John

    [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
    [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_%28database_architecture%29
  1.  permalink
    hi,
    I do think it's crucial for this project to be Buddypress proof/compliant,
    then many problems related with db and small (m.u.) communities
    will find in Lyceum a valid solution/alternatives.

    wishing the best.
    • CommentAuthorrobb_wi
    • CommentTimeMar 9th 2009
     permalink
    Hi,
    I strongly agree with lorenzocoffee.
    I became interested in wordpress MU because of buddypress, but their database structure does not seem to allow for its use without dedicated servers and all the like, and, honestly, so many tables...?

    If a new lyceum was available now I would already have installed it :-) Well, currently I'm searching a suitable and dependable software rather quickly...
    Cheers!
    • CommentAuthorStanley
    • CommentTimeMar 14th 2009
     permalink
    How many of you out there chose Lyceum over MU mainly because of the
    schema?

    aye!
    I prefer Lyceum because it's lean, and that's the most important thing by far.
    • CommentAuthorrobb_wi
    • CommentTimeMar 21st 2009
     permalink
    Well, I have not yet worked with MU and neither with lyceum because I came over this project very recently. In my eyes the "exotic" schema of MU makes its serious and scalable application for many small and medium webmasters more difficult because the huge potential amount of tables may become hard to handle.
    I have read about limitation in phpMyAdmin in the number of tables it can work with, and also issues arising from using so many tables on a shared DB server, as it usually is the case in "usual" webhosting and less-than-corporate class set ups.
    cheers
    • CommentAuthorhalophile
    • CommentTimeMay 20th 2009
     permalink
    If you're still thinking about working on Lyceum, I would be interested in using it!

    I recently discovered Wordpress MU, and only just today discovered that Dreamhost will no longer allow WPMU on shared servers. Since I cannot afford a private server, it seems like MU's resource load has gotten the best of me.

    It would really be ideal if there was a version of MU that simply worked efficiently for installations serving a handful of blogs. It seems like Lyceum could potentially be that version.

    Thanks for your work so far!
    Trevor