PivotX 2.0 features

PivotX 2.0 is completely redesigned from the ground up. We've payed a lot of attention to making the interface visually pleasing, but also that it won't irritate if you see it often. Since most people work with their weblogtool every day, this is very important. Here are a few screenshots of what the User Interface looks like:

For legibility these screenshots are cropped to fit within the window. You'll find these and more in full here: Screenshots.

Entries and Pages

The main reason you'll use an application like Pivot is probably that you have something you'd like to share with the rest of the world. Pivot allows you to maintain multiple weblogs as well as seperate pages. The main difference between these is that Pages can have any template you like, whereas weblog items are grouped chronologically and displayed in the same way as the other stuff in the same weblog.

Several functions make weblogging really easy using Pivot. You can choose whether you'd like tou use the built-in Wysiwyg editor, or if you'd like to craft your HTML by hand. Inserting a clickable image (like the ones you see on this page), audio file or Youtube video is very simple and can be done without leaving the "Write an Entry" screen.

In this video you'll see how I'm going to add a clickable image to an Entry. First you'll see me select an image from the previously uploaded images, but when I can't find the image I'm looking for, I upload a new file. Then I make a thumbnail and insert the image into the Entry. Note that the screen doesn't need to refresh when I'm uploading.

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Commenting

Leaving comments is as easy as ever. If you allow your visitors to use emoticons in their comments, they'll get help adding the proper codes by using the toolbar and the emoticons reference.

Pivot weblogs have state of the art anti-spamming measurements. These make it harder to leave comment spam, but they won't irritate legitimate commenters.

Images and Files

Handling images and text-files is very easy with PivotX 2. You'll be able to see all the files you've uploaded and edit or delete them.

Using the built-in Picnik extension you can even edit images without leaving Pivot. In the video below this is demonstrated. First you'll see me look up the image I need, after which i'll edit it in Picnik. Note that after editing the original file is saved, so you can always go back if you've made a mistake.

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Extensions

We've created a very powerful and flexible extension framework. Developers can create Extensions that 'hook' into the core Pivot X functionality. Things like adding items to the Admin Interface, processing the page before it is sent to the user, or adding functionality to the 'front-end' like fully configurable widgets or extra [[tags]] you can use in your templates.

The Extensions are manageable through the admin interface. You can enable and disable them. Extensions can have their own configuration screens, so you can administrate them without messing about in the PHP code.

The type of extension that might get used the most is the so called Widget. Basically this is a 'thing' that somebody made, so you can place it on your website. In the Admin Interface you can enable them and re-order them as you like. They will then show up on you site without having to change your templates at all. Some other weblog tools have this functionality as well, but what makes them so special in Pivot X is the way we put them on your page. Normally they are just included in the page, which means that if the server providing the widget is down, your site will take up to a minute to load. We've done this in such a way that broken widgets will not negatively impact the performance of your website.

Templates

PivotX 2 has a very powerful template engine under the hood, which is called Smarty. In fact, it's so good, that it's not just used for the templates for your site, but the Pivot Admin Interface itself is completely powered by Smarty as well.

This new template engine has a few great benefits: Templates are easy to understand, yet very powerful. You don't even have to know PHP to do the more complicated things. For example, compare a part of the default Pivot template with that of Wordpress. This is a portion of the template that displays a single entry:

<p class="entrynavigation">
	[[previousentry text="&laquo; <a href='%link%'>%title%</a>" ]] | 
	<a href="[[home]]">Home</a> | 
	[[nextentry text="<a href='%link%'>%title%</a> &raquo;" ]]
</p>   

<h2><a href="[[entrylink]]">[[title]]</a></h2>

<h3>[[subtitle]]</h3>

<p class="date">
	[[ date format="%dayname% %day% %monthname% %year% at %hour12%:%minute% %ampm%." ]]
	[[ tags ]]
	[[ editlink name=" - Edit" ]]
</p>

[[ introduction ]]
[[ body ]]

<p class="comments">[[ commcount ]]</p>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

	<div class="navigation">
		<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link') ?></div>
		<div class="alignright"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;') ?></div>
	</div>

	<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
		<h2><a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: 
				<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

		<div class="entry">
			<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read the rest of this entry &raquo;</p>'); ?>

			<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 
			'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
			<?php the_tags( '<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>

			<p class="postmetadata alt">
				<small>
					This entry was posted
					<?php /* $entry_datetime = abs(strtotime($post->post_date) - (60*120)); 
							echo time_since($entry_datetime); echo ' ago'; */ ?>
					on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> at <?php the_time() ?>

You'll have to agree that [[ singlepermalink text="%title%" title="Permanent link to %title%" ]] looks a lot less intimidating than the Wordpress equivalent: <a href="<?php echo get_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

Like I said, it's not necessary to use PHP inside your templates, but if you really, really want to you're always able to do so. We use caching so Pivot X is less demanding on your server. Without having precautions in place you'll be able to get tons of visitors to your Pivot X powered site without the web server breaking a sweat.

There's one more very cool aspect of this caching mechanism. Don't you hate it when you're being linked to a website from Digg or Slashdot, only to find out that there is an "Error establishing a database connection"?
Besides the fact that our cache will make it much harder for your site to crash the database, Pivot will also be able to keep on serving pages from the cache as long as the Database is unreachable. In the meantime you can login to the Admin interface and fix whatever is wrong with the site.

There are more clever things we've done with the templates. Whenever you insert a popup or use a widget, Pivot automatically adds the correct javascript to the <head> section of the page, so you won't have to edit the template. This works the same for feed autodiscovery: If you enable XML-feeds in the configuration screens, the correct tags will be added to your pages, so people can easily subscribe to your Feeds.