WordPress MU

hey

I'm trying to decide whether to go WPMU or Lyceum: http://lyceum.ibiblio.org/

A major thing I want to be able to do is restrict who can setup a blog (so manually doing it fo them), and allow those people to customise their own blog with whatever theme and perhaps plugins they want.

Which platform would be better?

(lol, I know I'll probably get the majority saying WPMU... but Lyceum don't have a forum atm)

cheers
nathan

MU can do what you want, that's all I have for you. :)

I too downloaded Lyceum but haven't installed it yet. I'd prefer the plain ol' MU but the feature set is appealing. I take it the base MU does NOT have these capabilities (quoting from the site above)?

- One installation with a static number of database tables supports an arbitrary number of users and blogs.

- Each blog delivers the complete WordPress user experience. Lyceum changes very little in terms of user interface elements or per-blog features.

- Users and blogs are not isomorphically related. Any user may have privileges on zero or more blogs, any blog may have an arbitrary number of users, each with arbitrary permissions.

- Complete compatibility with WordPress themes (requiring very slight modification).

- Complete compatibility with WordPress plugins which do not use the database. Those which use the database may be modified to be compatible with Lyceum.

- Activation of plugins on a system-wide basis.

- Activation, by each blog administrator, of plugins on a per-blog basis.

TIA,

-kj-

The only differences I've seen are as follows:

"- One installation with a static number of database tables supports an arbitrary number of users and blogs."

This is the biggest difference between Lyceum and MU. The initial master table structure is not as big in Lyceum as it is in MU. If you have issues with phpAdmin not liking a huge amount of tables, this would be a plus, but from a database management/efficiency perspective, it's just an either/or situation as you still wind up with about the same number of fields.

Soem people might tell you different, but in my 15+ years of working with databases, that's my official opinion that it doesn't really matter. Besides, they're *indexed* fields, not sequential. Still gotta hop around all that data regardless.

"- Users and blogs are not isomorphically related. Any user may have privileges on zero or more blogs, any blog may have an arbitrary number of users, each with arbitrary permissions."

Self-explanitory. In MU, if you want to be an author on a blog that is not yours, you need to have another blog on the system. BUT there is a mod/hack to get around this.

I *think* Lyceum allows users to edit themes as well. Not sure on that. MU doesn't, really. Not by default. And users cannot upload their own plugins in MU.

Every other point listed above is pretty much the same in MU. Some themes require no modification at all.

Oh, and Lyceum uses a subdirectory structure for blog address instead of virtual subdomains. So if you couldn't get MU working with vhosts on or off, give Lyceum a try.

I've got to admit that I'm a little concerned about the number of tables that MU produces. I understand that if you open it up for the public, MU is more server software than what one would normally find hosted within a typical shared account. (Well, that's my experience) I know Matt and crew have WP.com set up with MySQL dataservers and all that but they closing in on 200k blogs also.

I've also got to admit that I'm also concerned about Lyceum's "Alpha" status. At least MU is coming off a very stable base of WP.

I have 3000 users registered right now and growing quickly, which results in 30000+ tables in the database, and can't say I'm really noticing big performance problems.
I'm going to have to customize it a bit, so that the user tables are split among multiple databases. This is because i've read linux may have problems at some stage with too many files in a given folder (30000 tables in mysql means 90000 files on the FS), and because if at some stage performance becomes a problem, it will be easier that way to split the server in multiple parts. I must say having one set of tables instead of so many per user is the only one thing i'd like to change about WPMU. It gives my phpmyadmin headaches, and really makes things painful if you want to add sitewide/crossblog features.

For sitewide stuff at that stage with 30k users, I'd be caching by then. Say setting up the sitewide pages for every 15 minutes or so but doing 100 links instead of 10.

well you can cache, still you need scripts much more complex to loop through all tables, it's much harder to do stuff like sorting etc. And it still results in 3000 queries instead of 1 big. Sitewide features is really the one thing so far i find wpmu hard to work with.

Ditto 10,000+ on one site and another est. 20,000 running off the same server with no performance issues at all.

"Self-explanitory. In MU, if you want to be an author on a blog that is not yours, you need to have another blog on the system. BUT there is a mod/hack to get around this."

What mod/hack are you refering to here? Is it possible to have a user in MU without a blog? I thought this was one of the most sought after request yet to come? Thanks.

samcheg: http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/Additional-Users

If you install bsuite for stats & sk2 for spam there are 15 db tabels per user :-/

On the other hand lyceum does not support virtual hosts and one should write a script for porting from wpmu to lyceum...
There just isnt't any perfect solution, is it...

Oh wow! When did Andrew write that patch? Didn't happen to be in my memory. Have to be getting old. :))

A downside to Lyceum is that every SQL query has been altered to accomodate the different table structure. This increases chance for error, and would make the wait between WP versions longer since each version has to be meticulously updated. It most certainly would break plugins that do thier own queries or db table alterations.

After much thought and previous debate on the subject, I personally choose mu because if I ever do reach hardware or O/S limits it would not require much code to begin to split blogs over multiple servers.

samchng, the patch is the one farms has been using for a while now. I just uploaded it so that everyone could have access to it.

"I personally choose mu because if I ever do reach hardware or O/S limits it would not require much code to begin to split blogs over multiple servers."

Exactly.

It really isn't as much performance issues as problems when creating sitewide features that's the biggest issue imho. For instance, I have a small plugin that gets the top 10 most active blogs, and when it's not feeding the info from the cache, it has to run 3000+ queries.

Still, I'm glad i picked mu for mostly the reasons mentionned above, but one must be aware that as soon as you try to make your blogging site a community rather than a blog hosting service, you'll run into complications because of the architecture.

Thank you andrew for your reply. :)

Hey y'all. I'm the author of Lyceum. Just wanted to mention that Lyceum does do either subdomain or directory style URLs.

If anyone has other questions, let me know.

Regarding themes and plugins: Lyceum does NOT allow users to edit or upload either. They must be installed by the system administrator. Then, an admin of each blog may choose from the available themes, and may activate and configure plugins, on a per-blog basis.

Acctually it's not really smart let some joe hack themes and upload plugins. It's just too BIG security risk...

johnjosephbachir:
I have a question.. what does Lyceum use for visitior statistics and what for spam killing?
With mu one can use are sk2 & bsuite, but these two plugins use seperate tables and I believe this is not compatible with Lyceum acrhitecture...

We haven't built in any stats tools, but that's a great idea. Wanna make a ticket for it? :)

Regarding themes or plugins which need their own tables... they can be used with Lyceum but will of course often need to be modified first in order to work with the multiblog schema.

Regarding spam, you can read about out strategy in the "Spam" section of this article, near the end:

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/019may06/features/lyceum/

no.. i'm scared.. lyceum sounds so devilsh :P

I've read the article. Unfortunally the trackback spam is not mentioned although I find this spam the most anonying. Because there is no comment box it is not possible to put captcha, js or something else near.

The problem with aksimet is in additional blog user needs to create on wordpress.com...

I would like to add that lyceum feels like one big blog system. Wmu on the other hand is more like "blogs with something in common".

Anyway, this two communities should probably merge together. I don't know how and when, but it would be a good thing for multi-user blog systems >:)

The trackback issue is something that still needs to be addressed in Lyceum. As it is now, they just don't work :).

It is now possible to create an account at wordpress.com without creating a blog. I tried this soon after it was introduced and I think i had a hard time finding what my key was, until I created a blog, and then it popped up. I don't know if they've fixed this yet (or if I misunderstand something).

It's impossible to do spam filtering that constantly adapts to the spammers unless a centralized system such as Akismet is used. This is why spam filtering on webmail services such as gmail and yahoo, and also mail server solutions, is often much better than the standalone filtering on local clients (keep in mind that local clients also use the spam score tags in headers inserted by server-side solutions, so the client-side heuristics effectivity cannot be judge purely by what goes into your spam folder).

Anyway the point is, trackbacks don't work on Lyceum, and spam filtering with Akismet is the best there is right now :)

Hi,Is there any plugin can let user can edit their own themes?

telanks: try http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/User-Themes

johnjosephbachir:
hehe :)

on wordpress.com you need to create a blog for akismet key.. just user is only enough for comments..

I know it is better to have centralized system for spam catching, but bugging users with additional registrations just isn't a good solution...

Hmm... Maybe it would be OK to use one Akismet key for all blogs in system.. I wonder if it is posible.. anyone knows?

Thank you ruph:
I have saw the plugin.
But it seems that if you use the plugin,the users can write php.So I can't give every user a editing right。
But I want to give every user a editing right just like http://www.iblogs.com
Users can edit their custom theme without php,
Just use html and css.

I would not recommend doing what iblogs do. Their system is unsafe.
See here:

http://quenting.iblogs.com/

it took me 10 minutes to find a way to execute javascript in my blog. Letting users run javascript = being exposed to XSS hacking.

I just want everybody can edit their custom theme.But I need safe too.
Is there any way to do that?Can we forbidden javascript and other scipts?

What should we look out for there quenting?

*sighs*

WPMU has issues with admin password delivery (not to mention others) and Lyceum has issues of installation and missing links.

*shrugs*
There should be a third option methinks!