Today’s key term is “overhauled”. There are so many projects out there, not only in the blogsphere but in general, they have so much potential but for “X or Y” reason they are dropped even though the idea was quite good, this is not the case with the blogging platform called Pivot, it has been recently developed and it seemed as though as if the site and project were going to be left alone, this is when they announced a new version which looks amazing, in terms of admin interface and extra features. The site was also overhauled with a new design. PivotX is the name of the overhauled and fine tuned blogging application. Lets take a look at the features of this tool compared to the popular Wordpress.
MySQL and Flat Files:
Unlike many other blogging platforms out there which rely in MySQL to store and manage their data, Pivot works with MySQL and flat files which are great for people who don’t have access to MySQL on their servers or simply can’t afford the extra resources; either way it is a good thing to know that this script offers other options to MySQL. Wordpress works only if you have direct access to an SQL database, otherwise it has no other way to store your site’s data.
Admin Interface:
This is where Pivot has been greatly improved; previous versions were very simplistic because the menus and interface was too plain. Editing a file and publishing your content seemed difficult even though the application was designed to provide a straight forward interface. In the new PivotX, the entire admin area has been redesigned to be user friendly and offer better edition options, from the WYSIWYG interface to image cropping tools.
In PivotX the very first thing you will see are your entries and comments in the Entries and Pages tab which acts as the dashboard main page, it shows which user edited the entry and it also give you the option to modify or delete the content.
The new entry interfaces is even better than that of Wordpress, the WYSIWYG window has a lot more text formatting options and each post cant be categorized in more than one section of your blog, making it easy for people to find the post in several relevant categories; if you are a Movable Type user you will find some similarities in this blogging software. PivotX also allows users to create new blogs directly from the dashboard more like Movable Type and Wordpress MU.
When you edit a page or the categories a pop-up screen will show up and the background where the dashboard is will be grayed out, this screen is not a pop-up window, it is there to make sure you do not focus on what’s in the background but in the task you just triggered, this system has been set to work throughout the entire admin area.
The template editing system is a lot better than the one found in Wordpress since it has more controls and is powered by Smarty.
Image Cropping Tool and Media Management:
The media management tab in PivotX is very well organized and shows users what content has been uploaded to the blog, when it comes to images it shows the size in Kilobytes and the image dimensions, but this is not all, PivotX uses Picnik which is a very powerful image editing tool that has been integrated in this blogging system and works perfectly. This feature allows you to actually edit an image and crop amazing thumbnails, for instance lets say you have a picture with the following dimensions: 500X500, with Picnik you can crop it to 300×500, you can also alter the brightness and much more.
Picnik also works with Wordpress and can be added to extend it’s media handling capabilities, however it doesn’t come standard and not many people know about it until they see it in other applications. Overall, we must say that Pivot has come a long way and that it is a very intuitive blogging tool.
MySQL and Flat Files:
Unlike many other blogging platforms out there which rely in MySQL to store and manage their data, Pivot works with MySQL and flat files which are great for people who don’t have access to MySQL on their servers or simply can’t afford the extra resources; either way it is a good thing to know that this script offers other options to MySQL. Wordpress works only if you have direct access to an SQL database, otherwise it has no other way to store your site’s data.
Admin Interface:
This is where Pivot has been greatly improved; previous versions were very simplistic because the menus and interface was too plain. Editing a file and publishing your content seemed difficult even though the application was designed to provide a straight forward interface. In the new PivotX, the entire admin area has been redesigned to be user friendly and offer better edition options, from the WYSIWYG interface to image cropping tools.
In PivotX the very first thing you will see are your entries and comments in the Entries and Pages tab which acts as the dashboard main page, it shows which user edited the entry and it also give you the option to modify or delete the content.
The new entry interfaces is even better than that of Wordpress, the WYSIWYG window has a lot more text formatting options and each post cant be categorized in more than one section of your blog, making it easy for people to find the post in several relevant categories; if you are a Movable Type user you will find some similarities in this blogging software. PivotX also allows users to create new blogs directly from the dashboard more like Movable Type and Wordpress MU.
When you edit a page or the categories a pop-up screen will show up and the background where the dashboard is will be grayed out, this screen is not a pop-up window, it is there to make sure you do not focus on what’s in the background but in the task you just triggered, this system has been set to work throughout the entire admin area.
The template editing system is a lot better than the one found in Wordpress since it has more controls and is powered by Smarty.
Image Cropping Tool and Media Management:
The media management tab in PivotX is very well organized and shows users what content has been uploaded to the blog, when it comes to images it shows the size in Kilobytes and the image dimensions, but this is not all, PivotX uses Picnik which is a very powerful image editing tool that has been integrated in this blogging system and works perfectly. This feature allows you to actually edit an image and crop amazing thumbnails, for instance lets say you have a picture with the following dimensions: 500X500, with Picnik you can crop it to 300×500, you can also alter the brightness and much more.
Picnik also works with Wordpress and can be added to extend it’s media handling capabilities, however it doesn’t come standard and not many people know about it until they see it in other applications. Overall, we must say that Pivot has come a long way and that it is a very intuitive blogging tool.
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