Wordpress tips, tricks and tools

Wordpress vs Pivot

Today’s key term is “overhauled”.  There are so many projects out there, not only in the blogsphere but in general, they have so much potential but for “X or Y” reason they are dropped even though the idea was quite good, this is not the case with the blogging platform called Pivot, it has been recently developed and it seemed as though as if the site and project were going to be left alone, this is when they announced a new version which looks amazing, in terms of admin interface and extra features.  The site was also overhauled with a new design.  PivotX is the name of the overhauled and fine tuned blogging application.  Lets take a look at the features of this tool compared to the popular Wordpress.

MySQL and Flat Files:

Unlike many other blogging platforms out there which rely in MySQL to store and manage their data, Pivot works with MySQL and flat files which are great for people who don’t have access to MySQL on their servers or simply can’t afford the extra resources; either way it is a good thing to know that this script offers other options to MySQL.  Wordpress works only if you have direct access to an SQL database, otherwise it has no other way to store your site’s data.

Admin Interface:

This is where Pivot has been greatly improved; previous versions were very simplistic because the menus and interface was too plain.  Editing a file and publishing your content seemed difficult even though the application was designed to provide a straight forward interface. In the new PivotX, the entire admin area has been redesigned to be user friendly and offer better edition options, from the WYSIWYG interface to image cropping tools.

In PivotX the very first thing you will see are your entries and comments in the Entries and Pages tab which acts as the dashboard main page, it shows which user edited the entry and it also give you the option to modify or delete the content.

The new entry interfaces is even better than that of Wordpress, the WYSIWYG window has a lot more text formatting options and each post cant be categorized in more than one section of your blog, making it easy for people to find the post in several relevant categories; if you are a Movable Type user you will find some similarities in this blogging software.  PivotX also allows users to create new blogs directly from the dashboard more like Movable Type and Wordpress MU.

When you edit a page or the categories a pop-up screen will show up and the background where the dashboard is will be grayed out, this screen is not a pop-up window, it is there to make sure you do not focus on what’s in the background but in the task you just triggered, this system has been set to work throughout the entire admin area.

The template editing system is a lot better than the one found in Wordpress since it has more controls and is powered by Smarty.

Image Cropping Tool and Media Management:

The media management tab in PivotX is very well organized and shows users what content has been uploaded to the blog, when it comes to images it shows the size in Kilobytes and the image dimensions, but this is not all, PivotX uses Picnik which is a very powerful image editing tool that has been integrated in this blogging system and works perfectly.  This feature allows you to actually edit an image and crop amazing thumbnails, for instance lets say you have a picture with the following dimensions: 500X500, with Picnik you can crop it to 300×500, you can also alter the brightness and much more.

Picnik also works with Wordpress and can be added to extend it’s media handling capabilities, however it doesn’t come standard and not many people know about it until they see it in other applications.  Overall, we must say that Pivot has come a long way and that it is a very intuitive blogging tool.

Wordpress vs Nucleus

Content management systems slash blog utility, this is the battle between Nucleus and the well known blogging platform Wordpress.  Nucleus is a CMS which allows users to manage multiple blogs all from one central administration screen, there are several features found in Nucleus which are also found in Wordpress but the few that are not included in Wordpress are definitively worth mentioning.  Nucleus is a very simple blog script and content management system which provides a straight forward user interface, the blogging script is free and can be downloaded straight from their site unlike other blogging tools which tie you up to subdomains.  Lets take a look at Nucleus features compared to Wordpress’s:

Multi-Blog Management:

Both Nucleus and the Multi-user version of Wordpress (Wordpress MU) offer multi blog handling capabilities and are very easy to configure, however in Wordpress some users might need additional plugins to make it work across multiple domains.

Site Aspect and Admin Area Organization:

Besides being an easy to use CMS/Blog application, Nucleus front store can be customized with several “skins” which are the same thing as “templates” in Wordpress, there are not many skins available for nucleus but you can get someone to design one for you; Wordpress in the other hand has no such as thing as shortage of themes, in fact this is the blogging system which has the most themes and plugins available, the community is very active in this matter and adds new themes and plugins on a daily basis.

When it comes to the admin areas, both Wordpress and Nucleus are very simple to use.  Nucleus has a left sidebar which is divided in three sections, one which manages the main area and provides links to your settings, items and comments.  The management area provides easy access to your action log,  global settings, member management, blog management, backups and plugin control.  The last area deals with the layout of your site and has direct links to your skins area, the templates    and an additional section which lets you import or export items, for instance you can choose to upload a picture from your hard drive directly into your blog for easy publishing, no need to upload it to an image folder using an FTP program.  Wordpress has a top navigation system which offers several options and matches each and every function found in Nucleus, the aspect of each blog can be customized in MU and the main administrator can set user permissions as well.

Features:

One of the nicest features Nucleus offers to its users is that they are able to use what are called bookmarklets which are installed in the web browser they use and if the blogger finds something relevant to their site they are able to create a blog entry directly from the pop-up window without the need to login to the admin area of Nucleus, the same holds true for site editing, users can visit their site and after login in they are able to do all the modifications necessary with the click of a button.

There are Wordpress bookmarklets available but they are not directly promoted as one of the standard features that come with the script, they have been mostly developed by the community so there isn’t much documentation about them.

The plugin arena is where most blogging  applications fall short when they are compared to Wordpress’s extensive plugin library, Nucleus is not an exception however the plugins available are quite useful and the community has also released some utilities in order to expand Nucleus core capabilities.