WordPress MU

Since it's likely that for wpmu-powered sites performance will be one of the main issues, is anybody looking into Lightpress as a solution?

I wouldn't even begin to consider it. Did you read the part on limitations of LightPress on the LightPress-website?:

"WordPress templates do not work"

Well, templates aren't exactly the main consideration when choosing a system to develop a website. In fact, systems like Wordpress are successful because it's relatively easy to build or adapt a template. And currently, wpmu doesn't have exactly a great abundance of templates to choose from, witouth some tinkering.

My main consideration for my WPMU-site is the users and what they want. Performance is secondary. My users want loads of templates and loads of plugins - before performance. And there's a huge difference between WordPress templates do not work and WordPress templates does work with some tinkering. BTW, in my experience it's very few templates that need tinkering - most work out of the box :)

My users are of the other kind -- for them, poor performance is the dealbreaker :)

Well, that's marketing 1-oh-1 for you. The customer is always right ;)

Have you tried the LightPress plugin - and if so, did it work? And if not, what didn't work?

If I install it in mu-plugins -- nothing.

If I install it in plugins (and this is now the prefered option, since you'd want it to be 'invisible' to your users) -- lots of php errors just trying to access the lightpress menu in the admin panel.

I guess I'm not following what you mean by "poor performance" and it being likely.

Very few themes for MU? There are few themes that are MU specific, yes. Standard themes for WP *usually* work in MU.

Then again, not if they have hte options page made with Ohz's theme toolkit (minor tinker though) and there's also a whole pile of themes i;ve had to make minor edits to get to function on a regualr WP blog, which isn;t the fault of the publishing system but the fault of the theme designer who released it.

And with a few hundred, possibly over a thousand themes to choose from.. I mean, really. :)

gestor has a good point, lightpress is very fast. It' also template-based. IMHO, wordpress isn't (php + html != template ;-)

using a template system like the one in lightpress (or smarty or ... ) would make it much easier to allow the user to edit her template in a safe way.