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!
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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.
...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!
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.
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!
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
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.