[Lyceum-users] the future of Lyceum
David R. Woolley
drwool at thinkofit.com
Sat Feb 14 18:32:22 EST 2009
I installed Lyceum for my son's high school. (See the public blogs at
http://watershedhs.org/currents).
At the time I did this (summer of 2006) I chose Lyceum because it
seemed better suited to our purpose than WordPress MU. Here's what I
was looking for:
* Ability to run multiple blogs (around 20 or so) on one site without
having to install a separate copy of WordPress for each one.
* Common theme/style for all blogs, and ability to update the theme
once and have changes instantly apply to all blogs on the site.
* Shared userid/password for all blogs.
* Central control of blog creation. We did not want just anyone to be
able to create a blog.
* Central administration over all blogs - in particular, central
control over who has admin access to each individual blog. These
blogs are all "owned" by the school rather than any one individual,
and responsibility for maintaining any particular blog changes as
faculty and volunteers come and go.
* Ability to search across all blogs on the site.
* Ability to make use of the vast library of WordPress plugins.
Except for that last item, Lyceum has served our purposes very, very
well. (Plugins have turned out to be problematic because Lyceum is
always a few steps behind WordPress development, so incompatibility
is a frequent problem.)
We have no need to run a massive blog farm, as WordPress MU seemed to
be designed for.
I haven't followed development of MU since I looked at it nearly
three years ago, so I have no idea whether it would now serve as a
good platform for us. It would have to offer something pretty good
for us to go to the trouble of switching over, as Lyceum is working
well for our purposes - especially since we upgraded to 1.03 which
fixed a few nagging problems and greatly improved the central
administration features.
The main downside of Lyceum for us has been that it's been hard to
get answers to technical questions and problems -- though I can't
complain much, given that John Bachir has been doing pretty much all
the development by himself with very little reward! Fortunately I've
been able to figure things out myself for the most part.
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