Lyceum-users mailing list

[<drivencompassion AT gmail.com>]

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)