Lyceum-users mailing list

["David R. Woolley" <drwool AT thinkofit.com>]

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.