Posts Tagged: lyceum

Software — 1 Comment
11
Oct 07

Lyceum’s 1.0 Release

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.

Noticed / Software — No Comments
18
May 06

Lyceum in Red Hat Magazine

In the new edition of Red Hat magazine, Lyceum chief software architect John Joseph Bachir has a fantastic article about the Lyceum project. JJB provides a complete overview of the project – the rationale behind its conception, key design decisions, security and spam strategies, and project management. For folks who want secure, scalable multi-user multi-blog services (that are free and open source), this article should shed some very valuable insight.

As Lyceum has hit the .31 Milestone, I’d really encourage people to give it a try. Thousands around the net have downloaded and installed Lyceum, and we’re getting great feedback from the community. There are a number of outstanding tasks for developers interested in getting in early on a project that has serious value and staying power. This summer, I’ll be devoting a bigger chunk of my time to PM and community-enrichment activities for Lyceum (we recently received a $25,000 grant from the Smallwood foundation), so consider this an invite for OS developers to explore the project.

The Red Hat Magazine article, coupled with my forthcoming article in Reference Services Review, should provide good support material for libraries and universities exploring the deployment of scalable multi-user/multi-blog installations. For these institutions willing to install and deploy Lyceum, we’ll be providing no-charge, close support to the first few use cases. We’re really interested in seeing Lyceum on campus – we feel it perfectly fits the blogging needs of libraries and universities. Please feel free to contact me at fred at metalab.unc.edu if you’re interested.

Software — No Comments
16
Nov 05

Lyceum available for download

For those of you who would like to experiment with their own Lyceum installations, please navigate to http://lyceum.ibiblio.org/downloads/. You’ll be able to download a recent version of Lyceum, explore the code, and generally get a feel for the software.