Frequently Asked Questions

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Below are frequently asked questions about using and troubleshooting the Lyceum software. You may also be interested in the basic faq about the lyceum project

Lyceum is not sending out notification emails - where do I configure the email settings such as the mail server, password, email address used?

Lyceum sets the ‘from’ field for each generated email it sends to be the address entered during installation – the admin account’s email address. As for the mail server that is used - configuring PHP's mail() settings is something which is done in the php.ini file on your server. If you aren't running your own server, you should ask the admin of your web host about this setting. Just uncomment (by removing the semicolon) and configure the proper lines:

[mail function]
; For Win32 only.
; SMTP = smtp.yourdomain.com

; For Win32 only.
; sendmail_from = youremail@yourdomain.com

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; sendmail_path = /somepath/sendmail

Do you have any recommendations/warnings about hosting services for Lyceum?

Be wary of running a big Lyceum installation on a shared hosting plan. lyceum is powerful because it makes running a lot of blogs easy to manage and set up, it doesn't magically make 30 blogs run as if they were 1 blog - a 300 blog lyceum site will put the same load on a server as 300 single wordpress blogs. Would your shared hosting site be okay with you running 300 (or however many) blogs on it? If so, then there should be no problems. Remember that you might be running only 15 this month, but before you know it in 10 months you might be running 120 and things will be slowing down and you might be getting complaints from your hosting provider.

That said, for folks who want to put up some blogs for themselves and some friends and don't anticipate hosting more than a few dozen blogs in the long term, Lyceum on shared hosting is a great solution.

From a technical standpoint: you need PHP and mySQL 4.x.x. If you can find a host with PHP and mySQL 5.x.x, even better.

By default Lyceum uses innodb mysql tables, so if possible find a host which supports those.

The documentation regarding subdomains says that a wildcard DNS server setting is required. Can apache be configured for subdomains on a per-directory basis? Is this possible on a shared host?

This is possible in apache via virtualhosts (which most shared hosts such as Ibiblio use), IE in the httpd.conf you have a virtualhost declaration such as:

<VirtualHost *>
       ServerName blogs.yourdomain.com
       ServerAlias *

       ServerAdmin fusion@ibiblio.org
       DocumentRoot "/somepath/yoursite/"

       <Directory "/somepath/yoursite/">
               Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
               AllowOverride All
               Order allow,deny
               Allow from all
       </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

But if you're using a shared host you should just be able to request the wildcard DNS entry for your site and the admin can configure it.

I´m doing a "blogzine" with about 10 blogs and I would like to show in each blog the last 10 posts on the entire site. Is there any way to do that?

There is currently no 'point and click' way to do that, but if you know php and mysql you should be able to write a function to do that. If we get enough requests for this functionality, we may implement it.

I'd like to replace the portal page with one of my blogs so I can put site news, etc on the main page.

Once you have created the blog you wish to be the main page, edit your wp-config.php from the first example to the second:

define('DEFAULTBLOG', false); // use default portal

define('DEFAULTBLOG', "blogname"); // use this blog as portal

I have installed Lyceum under http://myhost/lyceum/src/lyceum but I would like to have it only under http://myhost/lyceum and have all the subdirectories under src/lyceum in that directory. Is this possible?

The easiest thing to do in order to have a prettier URL for your installation is not to move around the lyceum file structure, but to add an alias to your server's configuration. For apache you simply add a line to httpd.conf like this:

Alias /lyceum /actualpath/lyceum/src/lyceum

or Apache on Windows:

Alias /lyceum "C:\Program Files\yourserver\path\lyceum\src\lyceum"

If you do use this Alias method (whether on *nix or Windows), you'll need edit the corresponding line in wp-config.php, to e.g.

define('WEBROOT', '/lyceum'); 

Otherwise the URL field in browsers will still show the old path even though the Apache alias may be working fine.

For IIS, you will need to create a virtual directory as described here

This is, of course, assuming you are the admin of your server, otherwise you'll need to ask your admin to create an alias / virtual directory. The important thing to note is that you will need to alter the WEBROOT variable in your wp-config.php to match the alias. However, if you change WEBROOT then you must reinstall Lyceum, otherwise most of the links in your installation will be broken.

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