Pivot

I have had high hopes for the new version of Pivot, a blog engine that has a fairly long history. It has used flat files for storage, so it requires only PHP to work on any server.

I liked the test installation of version 1.45 I played with last year. But it was slow. The public pages were slow to load, and the administration pages were brutally slow.

The developers have been working on a major update for several months, and I tried version X alpha 3 earlier this spring. It was a improvement over version 1.45, but not enough to get me excited.

This weekend, I downloaded and installed version X2beta. One of the major changes to this new version is that it works with your choice of flat files or MySQL; an excellent choice to have. The install was effortless. The admin side work fast, and I was getting excited. But then I tried to view the home page of my test site, and couldn't. In the admin, I specified a certain content page as home. I double checked. I looked at all the user admin settings. I logged out. I tried another browser. I can't see the home page. No matter what I do, I see the admin login page. But I can't see any content.

Big disappointment. Guess I'll wait and see if the next beta, or the finished product, works correctly.

If it does, Pivot could be a player in my book. It offers many features. The new backend works fast, and is laid out logically and cleanly. In all, the admin interface is top notch. Now if I can just get a look at the public side!