Since last summer I’ve been working with Xenium Group’s excellent PivotCMS. At the time I started using it, my only real CMS experience was with TextPattern – a CMS of a fundamentally different design.

TextPattern is one of the new breed of small CMSes: very dynamic, conditionally structured, blog-oriented (which is to say: chronologically-oriented). Pivot, on the other hand, has been around as long as Blogger, and seemed more static and stodgy, overly concerned with things like security and documents.

In hindsight, I realize that Pivot’s intended audience is not that of TextPattern’s. As Xenium Group puts it: Pivot’s “targeted feature set is not all things to all people.”

Since last summer I’ve continued to build sites with TextPattern and Pivot, and have become quite familiar with ExpressionEngine and Typo. Doing so has made three of Pivot’s best features stand out clearly.

Pivot is a hosted CMS.

Being hosted means no installation, no need to familiarize myself with a client’s hosting arrangement, no need to talk to tech support, no dealing with .htaccess files, et cetera – all of which means less time spent by me and less money spent by my client.

That also means that Xenium Group provides support for Pivot’s operation, as part of the package, which means that my clients don’t have to wait for a hole in my schedule to get help – they can just go straight to the source.

Pivot publishes sites via FTP.

At first I hated this idea: Why not generate the site dynamically? That’s the slick way to do it. Creating the site in one place, then pushing it to another via FTP seemed unnecessarily complicated and needlessly time-consuming.

Now I get it.

When I redesign a site using ExpressionEngine, I build the new version on a staging server of my own. Then, when it comes time to launch, I have to do a multi-part dance:

1. The customized installation of EE needs to be moved to the client’s server, though without disturbing the old site that’s already in place;
2. That installation needs to be tweaked to match the client’s server’s setup, which always differs from mine; and
3. The old site needs to be turned off, and the new site turned on, simultaneously, and without interfering with each other.

That operation can go well, or it can go poorly; but it’s never simple. There’s always too much room for error.

When I redesign a site that uses Pivot, I can mess about with things on the CMS side to my heart’s content. Then, when everything’s ready to go live, I just click the Publish button and the new version gets sent out, via FTP. Simple as can be.

Pivot offers real previews.

Every CMS lets you preview articles; that’s a given. But Pivot’s the only one I’ve seen that lets you see a preview that actually shows what the final web page will look like.

Again, this is because Pivot is hosted and publishes its sites statically, via FTP. When you’re working with Pivot, you’re working on a Xenium Group server. You make changes to a document and click Preview, and Pivot generates a new version of that document from the appropriate templates, including all images and stylesheets, and serves it up for your previewing pleasure.

Makes sense, right? On the other small CMSes I have to jump through hoops to accomplish the same thing.

In conclusion.

Pivot isn’t right for every project, but then it isn’t meant to be. For sites that are suited for Pivot, it offers a solid array of features, plus a few stand-outs. It’s worth a look.