Lyceum: Another Multi-User WP?

March 1, 2006

I just saw at Boingboing a link to Lyceum, “a powerful and easy to use multi-blog WordPress that could be used for installations with 2 or 200,000 blogs.” Given that WordPress is free/open source, anyone is free to use and change the code, and that’s what the Lyceum team did.

My immediate question is: how does Lyceum relate to WPMU? In particular, why do Lyceum? Why use it, rather than WPMU? How does the multi-user-ness of Lyceum differ from that of WPMU?


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19 Responses to “Lyceum: Another Multi-User WP?”

  1.   John Bachir Says:

    Hi. I’m the developer of Lyceum.

    The main difference between Lyceum and MU is the database schema. MU creates a set of tables, I believe 8 or 9, for each blog in a system. Lyceum uses a fixed number of tables for the entire system.

    Another difference is that in Lyceum, each blog can turn (pre-aproved, admin-installed) plugins on and off as they like. (Does MU have this now? It didn’t have this the last time I looked at it several months ago)

    We’ve also made a smattering of security and performance tweaks.

    I should probably address this in the FAQ.

    Thanks for your interest, let me know if you have any more questions.

  2.   Andrew Says:

    Thanks, John, for your rapid response here.

  3.   Changing Way » Blog Archive » Says:

    [...] Lyceum is, as I recently noted elsewhere, similar to WordPress Multi-User. I was wondering what the differences were. Matt just remarked on some of them. [...]

  4.   Matt Says:

    I would be interested in hearing more about the security and performance tweaks. I didn’t see anything apparent in the code.

  5.   Andrew Says:

    Yes, I would also be interested in hearing a bit more about the security and performance tweaks. I spent a solid month looking for ways to tweak WPMU for performance and there really aren’t any without compromising security.

  6.   moslemblog Says:

    I am going to try both, however when I talk to John Bachir, the Lyceum is not supporting the subdomain yet.
    I think he should look into it fast , as it is much prefered by bloggers

  7.   John Bachir Says:

    Lyceum now support subdomains. :)

  8.   Lugo Says:

    I’m looking for a multi-user blog system if possible based on WP. Today I found WPMU and Lyceum. Without having installed none of them I would start by Lyceum because the smaller number of tables for all the blogs.
    Having 8 or 9 tables per blog it will end with hundreds of tables.

    I wonder how wordpress.com manages that :)

    Thanks,

  9.   Andrew Says:

    wordpress.com uses pretty much the same table structure as wpmu. They may have even added a few tables per blog/user.

  10.   Tareque Says:

    Well,
    If wp.com uses 8/9 table per blog it should have several million table in the database. How does it able to manage in MySQL?

    Does it uses MySQL in backend?

    -tareque

  11.   Andrew Says:

    wp.com runs off of MANY databases.

  12.   mekasawfw Says:

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  13.   testosterone Says:

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  14.   Elliot Says:

    Is there a list of Lyceum blog hosts?

  15.   John Bachir Says:

    Is there a list of Lyceum blog hosts?

    Good idea! I just made one:

    http://wiki.lyceum.ibiblio.org/index.php/Featured_Lyceum_Installations

  16.   Elliot Says:

    That’s not much of a list with only one blog host :)

  17.   Andrew Says:

    John, I think that the list is a good idea – thanks for posting the link here.
    Andrew – the one who runs this blog, not the developer also called Andrew, who has also commented on this thread.

  18.   webmaster404 Says:

    Where did Lyceum go? I am getting a little tired of trying to figure out the latest wordpress mu build with it’s security risks. Very unstable!

  19.   Andrew Says:

    I’m not sure what you mean by “Where did Lyceum go?” I’ve checked some of the above Lyceum-related links, and they seem to work. As for the WPMU build questions, I’ll leave them to the forums.