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  • From: <drivencompassion AT gmail.com>
  • To: John Joseph Bachir <jjb AT ibiblio.org>, lyceum-users AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Lyceum-users] the future of Lyceum
  • Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:03:00 -0500

Welcome back John!

Maybe Automattic can hire you for WPMU - Normalized Edition?

- What value does Lyceum hold for you today?

As soon as Lyceum catches up with WPMU 2.7, I will reinstall and publicize
many installations. I'm quite intrigued with buddypress.org's extension of
WPMU - John, is this what your second described phase implements?

- Did you choose Lyceum over WordPress MU mainly because of the schema?

Yes.

- What other reasons do you have for using Lyceum?

The normalized database schema and when initially announced, active
development and greater stability than wpmu which was very difficult to work
with.

- In general, what do you like and dislike about Lyceum?

Like: simplicity
Dislike: lack of dev/freq updates to latest wp branch / wpmu (buddypress)

-----Original Message-----

From: John Joseph Bachir <jjb AT ibiblio.org>
Subj: [Lyceum-users] the future of Lyceum
Date: Thu Feb 12, 2009 1:48 am
Size: 5K
To: lyceum-users AT lists.ibiblio.org

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 dont 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 Lyceums
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. Lyceums schema is
normalized[1], MUs is, roughly speaking, sharded[2]. For massive
installations such as wordpress.com, asharded schema ispreferable.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 aseparate, 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 couldget Lyceum back on its feet in 2-4 months of development.
And dont 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.


Ill 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_(database_architecture)







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