Next month this weblog will be shamelessly promoting my personality for one year. Quite a lot of posts have been made and quite some changes have occurred over the year. One thing has remained the same. Pivot: the underlying publishing system I'm using to publish my writings on the internet. I've often been wondering how much more 'famous' or 'high profile' I'd be by know if my blogging activities had been happening on a more well-known publishing system such as WordPress or Movable Type. I've released quite some things for free use by the weblog community over the year. Pivot Blacklist and the Taggerati Tags extension are the most well-known ones. Besides that I released some smaller extensions and three free design templates. All of them have one thing in common: They were made for Pivot.

So why isn't this guy using WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern or any other more much more common publishing system, you may wonder. I've looked into many of them but I've never even thought about switching. Therefore, after a year of blogging I figured it would be nice to dedicate a posting to Pivot, a gem of a publishing system.

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The Basics

Pivot is a publishing system mostly used by webloggers. It can be used for other websites as well (quite well actually!) but it's most common use is for weblogging purposes. The system runs on any webserver with PHP 4 or higher installed, whether it runs Unix, Windows or MacOS X. Optionally it can use GD for easy thumbnail generation but this is not a requirement. What else? Well... absolutely nothing! If you have PHP, you can run Pivot. It's that simple.

Look Ma, no MySQL!

One of the most striking things about Pivot is the lack of any SQL database requirement. It runs completely without any database. This makes Pivot a perfect choice for those who don't have access to a database or those who have to pay extra for a (MySQL) database on their hosting account. Don't get the wrong idea about me, I'm a PHP developer and I love MySQL. However, I've never quite understood why something completely content-oriented such as a weblog would have to require a SQL database. Everything you'll ever need can be done without one and Pivot demonstrates this claim perfectly. If you surf around on this website you'll see quite some structuring going on. I've got categories, different subweblogs and a slew of other features that may trick the visitor into thinking it's SQL powered. Don't be fooled though, it's not there. No SQL tables were harmed during the generation of any of these pages.

Great looking backend

Pivot sports a very user-friendly and pretty looking backend. It's intuitive, easy to use and very sophisticated. In fact it gets better with every version. In the current beta's full wysywyg editing is being prepared. Uploading and selecting images is easy and if GD support is available it's even possible to create image thumbnails directly from within the CMS backend.

Is that pretty or what?

A plethora of features

I've been using Pivot for almost a year right now and it still keeps surprising me from time to time. If you click your way through my pages you'll probably notice it's rather advanced in terms of structure and functionality. Everything you see is done with Pivot and some freely available extensions. Until now, everything I first deemed impossible to do with it turned out to be possible using the excellent and extensive set of template tags. Writing plugins, or extensions as they're called, is fairly easy from a programmer's perspective. A rather unique new feature in Pivot 1.3 is a fully integrated moblog engine. While many people use Flickr or external moblog services for this, or install separate add-ons in order to make moblogging possible, Pivot has everything built in. It's as easy as sending a mail to a special address and it's posted directly onto your weblog. On this site you can see it in action if you click the moblog strip on top of my pages. A truly remarkable feature.

Community support

Another thing that sets Pivot apart is the community behind it. I've been an active internet user since 1992 which makes me some sort of veteran I guess. In my time I've been part of many online communities. The one behind Pivot is one of the friendliest and helpful ones I've ever participated in. Development is extremely active and Bob den Otter, author of the software is helpful and open to any suggestions the userbase may have. The community aspect of Pivot (the forum, to be precise) has been one of the things which encouraged me to create quite a lot of extra's for it.

Extra's

I guess some shameless self promotion is ok since I'm writing on my own weblog anyway. There are quite some interesting extra's available for Pivot of which I wrote two major ones myself. Pivot-Blacklist is probably the most hardened and comprehensive anti blogspam package on the planet. It takes care of comment-spam, referrer spam and trackback spam at a > 99,9% succes-rate. I get no spam on this site. Period. No spam of any kind. Pretty nice eh?

If you're a web 2.0 junkie and you love tags and interconnectivity you'll love Taggerati as well. If you're a frequent reader of this website you will probably have noticed what it can do. If you haven't, start by clicking here to check out the local tags cosmos to get started.

Besides these extra's I'm offering myself, there's a load of other interesting extensions created by other community members. You can check them all on the extensions subforum. It's very active and new stuff is being released weekly.

Closing notes

As I noted in the beginning of this posting, Pivot isn't as 'big' as WordPress or Movable Type. It's quite hot in the Netherlands but that's probably because it's a Dutch product. In my introduction I wrote that I might have been a much more well-known weblogger by now if my efforts on blog extensions had been done on one of the major publishing systems. Do I have regrets? Absolutely not. I haven't found a single reason to switch to another weblog system and I don't expect this to happen at all really. So, if you're sick and tired of your current publishing system you should definitely take a look at Pivot. It deserves a lot more atttention than it's currently getting. You'll fall in love with it just like I did!