PivotX 2.0 beta 1.8

Update: The beta was updated to version 1.8, and a lot of bugs are squashed. See this forum thread for details, on top of what has been fixed in beta 1.6. The install / download instructions have been changed to reflect this update.

After a lot of hard work, it's time to present PivotX 2.0 beta 1. If you're not up to speed on the cool things it can do, please check out the page with the feature overview(with videos), skip directly to the screenshots, or you can read the announcement for alpha_4.

There's a lot of new stuff in the release, compared to the previous alpha releases. This means the status has now officially changed from "really don't use this on production sites" to "OK, you can use it, if you think you can handle it".

Some of the new features include:

1. Built in Spam Protection (by means of HashCash and Spamquiz)
2. More supported languages (We now have English, German, Spanish, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Japanese and Romanian)
3. New and better Code Editor (for HTML and Templates), namely MarkItUp
4. Support for 'Extra Fields' in Entries and Pages.
5. Made the layout in 'Dashboard' and 'Entries' fluid, so they now display optimally on more resolutions..
6. Enforcing permissions on editing pages and entries for different user-levels.
7. We have a new Wordpress import script. It imports Entries, Pages, Users, Categories, Tags and Comments.
8. Updated all of the default templates to be tidier, more consistent, and easier to understand.

You can read more about the changes in the Changelog for beta 1 .

In about a week or two we're going to launch our new sub-sites, where you can download Themes and Extensions for PivotX. There will be some real gems to download, right from the start.

We're still working on the new documentation. It's going to be really comprehensive, but for now there are a few pages that might be of interest.

• Upgrading from Pivot 1.x
• Importing from Wordpress
• Some notes on the Templates and Template Tags.
• And finally, there's the short installation instructions below.

If you encounter any issues, please tell us about them in the Forum.

Note: Please be aware that this is still a beta release of
PivotX 2.0. This means there will be bugs, but they are getting fewer and further between all the time. So, do use this release only if you're comfortable using beta quality software.

This release comes in two flavours.

• PivotX 2.0 beta_18.zip
• PivotX 2.0 beta_18.tgz

Some of you might be wondering why there are no upgrade packages. Well, that is because you should not use this release to upgrade your current Pivot. That said, the package contains a file 'convertentries2sql.php', which you can use to convert your old entries to MySQL.

If you're upgrading from a previous alpha, just follow the instuctions below. Because of the way we store things, there is no chance of overwriting anything. Still, it never hurts to make a backup first.

As promised before, we'll be doing monthly releases, where each version will be closer to PivotX 2.0 final, and contain more features, and less bugs. See you back here in the first weekend of May!

Installation Instructions

There are two ways to set up the beta. A 'traditional' way, where you download the zip file, extract and upload to your webspace, or an easier one for those of you who have shell access to your webspace.

Regardless of what method you choose, you should first check if you have access to a MySQL database. And if you do, take note of the username, password, database name and database host. If you don't have MySQL you can use 'Flat Files'.

Method 1: Downloading extracting and uploading:

1. Download the .zip file with the scripts
2. Extract the file on your computer
3. Upload all extracted files to the webspace where you'd like to set up PivotX 2.0
4. Chmod the following folders to 777 (or anything else, as long as you make sure they are writable by the webserver)
   1. images/
   2. pivot/db/
   3. pivot/templates/ (and all files in it)
5. Open the location you've put PivotX 2.0 in a browser window.
6. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the first user.
7. Log in, and have fun!

Method 2: Set-up using the commandline

1. Log in on the shell, and go to the folder where you wish to set up PivotX 2.0.
2. Copy and Paste the following commands to the command-line: curl -O http://pivotx.net/files/pivotx2_beta18.tgz
tar -xvzf pivotx2_beta18.tgz
chmod -R 777 images/ pivot/db/ pivot/templates
3. If you can't use Curl, try this instead: wget http://pivotx.net/files/pivotx2_beta18.tgz
tar -xvzf pivotx2_beta18.tgz
chmod -R 777 images/ pivot/db/ pivot/templates
4. Open the location you've put PivotX 2.0 in a browser window.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the first user.
6. Log in, and have fun!

If you have issues with the beta, please go to our forum.

Finally, some things to note

1. We're developing using Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer 6 works somewhat.
2. Some functionality is still missing, like Trackbacks. This will be added, if more than one or two people actually want this.
3. Don't use more than one weblog just yet.
4. Although we haven't thoroughly tested it on PHP 4.x yet, we will promise full support for php 4.3.x for a while just yet. We'd like it if everybody was running PHP 5, but our investigations show that over 30% of the users of the first alpha is still on PHP 4.x.
5. If you're using MySQL, please make sure you have MySQL 4.1 or higher. It will work on 4.0, but you might get character encoding issues.