Some great news – Lyceum has hit its 1.0 release this morning. Lyceum is a project I’ve worked on since my pre-gradschool days at Ibiblio – it is a branch of Wordpress designed to facilitate large-installation community blogging. Pretty simply, you install Lyceum once, and then you can provision a blog to anyone in your community/intranet/school/etc. – and since it is built on Wordpress, you know you’re blogging with the best blogging engine around. Many congrats and thanks to Lyceum Chief Software Architect John Joseph Bachir for his great work. Thank you to the many community submitters (of both code and design) as well. He talks about some of the changes to the 1.0 release:
- Synchronized with WordPress 2.0.11
- Even greater plugin and theme compatibility with WordPress
- Improved and expanded search functionality
- Vastly improved interface for assigning permissions to users
- More complete set of system-admin tools for managing users and blogs
- Ability to restrict number of blogs a user can create
- Refined admin interface layout
- Performance optimizations, some of them very significant for large installations
- Bundled plugins: Lyceumified Akismet, Creative Commons wpLicense
- Dozens of bug fixes
In other Lyceum news, we’re currently in the process of submitting Lyceum for the Knight Foundation News Challenge awards. The News Challenge seeks technologies that bring communities together through news, and we feel that Lyceum, a tool designed to facilitate community blogging and sharing, does this quite well. Thank you to the many who wrote us letters of support.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
