Windmill Web Work

After years of using Pivot and – more recently – PivotX blogging software, I have moved the Windmill Web Work website to WordPress. Although I love PivotX as a blogging tool, it is not very widely used. WordPress on the other hand, has a huge following, and is used by millions of professional and amateur bloggers, and by a lot of corporate websites as well.

For a small webdesign agency like Windmill Web Work, it is nice to have experience with a niche blogging tool like PivotX, but it is also very useful to know stuff about WordPress, just because everybody assumes you do. Of course WordPress has its downsides as well, especially when it comes to the templating system. PivotX uses the template engine ‘Smarty‘, which means that you don’t have to be a programmer to be able to create a nice lay-out for your blog.

In fact, I was really disappointed with the way WordPress handles templates. Just compare the two screenshots  below of  the code to loop through the blog-entries, and you understand what I mean.

PivotX loop

WordPress Loop

On the other hand, the documentation for WordPress is so well written and organized, that anybody with a little PHP knowledge can learn how to deal with it pretty quick.

Since I have no experience with earlier versions of WordPress than 3.0, I can’t really make a good comparison for pre-3.0 installations of ‘WP’, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to install.

Install plug-ins from the back-end

Also, installation of plug-ins is a breeze, because you never even have to leave your WordPress back-end to install and activate them.

A big improvement, if I may believe people that have reviewed WordPress 3.0, is the increased ability to use it as a full-blown CMS. Now, truth be told, you can pretty much do the same with PivotX, but that requires more work.

Another big advantage of WordPress is the amount of plug-ins that are available for it. Of course there is a lot of junk and pieces of code that are incompatible with version 3.0, but still there are a lot of add-ons available. PivotX has only a small amount of (high quality) ‘extensions‘ available, and the number is growing every day, but I think it is safe to say that it will never get to the level of WordPress. It’s not hard to write your own extensions for it, but of course it does require some programming knowledge.

A pro of PivotX is the support community. The community is very small, but that has its advantages. If you have a problem, you can pretty much contact the lead developers directly (through the support forum), and it is almost guaranteed that your problem will be solved within the next 24 hours. Even requests for new extensions and functionalities are looked at on a daily basis, and if your request makes sense, there is a good chance it will be included in the core, or somebody will take the time to write an extension for you.

Where PivotX is especially lacking, is in the documentation department (although that’s being worked on as well). The basics are there though, and for most users that will be enough. The WordPress Codex is very well organized, and there are thousands of tutorials available online with advanced tips & tricks.

As a conclusion, I think it is safe to say that PivotX is the perfect choice if you want to start a blog. There is not a lot of choices in available themes and extensions (‘plug-ins’), so if you want something unique, you’ll have to do that yourself. The good thing is, thanks to Smarty, it’s easy to do. It is also very lightweight, and has native support for mod-rewrite (‘pretty links’) and other important things. For small websites with limited functionality, like my personal blog, PivotX will always be my first choice.

PivotX has just reached version 2.1.0RC (Release Candidate), and is being improved every day.

If you want to start a more complex website, and you don’t have any experience with programming, WordPress is probably the right choice. Although it is somewhat ‘bloated’ with features, a lot of people don’t mind that. If you don’t know what it is, don’t use it, and it will work out-of-the-box. Everybody can install nifty little additions without even using an FTP client or other scary things.

And oh, for people looking for the GIMP tutorials I had on my ‘old’ blog: they’re gone. I did not want to go through the trouble of converting the PivotX entries to WordPress, although I’m sure it wouldn’t be that hard. The good news is, in the future I will be publishing tutorials again, so just come back on a regular basis! (ever heard of RSS feeds? You can subscribe to the feed, so you’ll stay updated…

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