Multi blog solution: Somebody using Pivot?

Looking for a multiple site software?
Do you want a 'post once publish many' feature?

Building a blog network with Pivot looks easy.

I recently stumbled across a blog software which has outstanding publishing options. Normally I am using Textpattern as my preferred CMS for single site projects and I am very convinced about it. But Textpattern is not able to handle multiple sites as are most of the other blog CMS.

• Pivot is able to post to multiple sites in different article formats based on individual templates.
• Based on the categories for one article Pivot automatically knows on which one of n sites to publish the article.
• Having the full article on one blog and having the title and permalink only on n additional blogs is an out of the box and easy to realize Pivot core feature.

Yes, automatic publishing to different domains by only posting once. Blog networking made easy.

Pivot - An overview

The Pivot homepage.

Pivot is a web-based tool to help you maintain dynamic sites, like weblogs or online journals. Pivot is released under the GPL so it is completely free to use. It is written in PHP, and does not require additional libraries or databases to function.

Oops #1: No database required. To run Pivot, basically all you need is a webserver that runs PHP.

Some of the features of Pivot are:

• Sophisticated Categories/Weblogs system, so you can maintain several weblogs and publish your entries how you like
• Template based. Fully adaptable to your wishes
• Built in simple search tool
• Keeps simple statistics of how your visitors came to your site
• Easy to upload and include pictures with your log-entries
• Allows for making thumbnails of uploaded images
• Comment system that remembers your visitors (if they wish)
• Automagically creates RSS- and Atom-feeds
• IP-blocking,to prevent certain people from leaving comments
• Automagic Archiving by week or month, and/or by category
• Optionally supports full WYSIWIG editing of your posts (IE5.5+ on windows and Mozilla 1.3+ / FB 0.6+ on all Platforms)
• Supports Textile, both in entries and in comments
• No external databases are required, just plain PHP. This is to ensure Pivot runs on as many servers as possible.
• Makes valid XHTML, when possible

Source: Pivot documentation

Building a site template

For building a site there are many Pivot template tags available.

What I miss most from a 1st glance are if/else conditions i.e. to show tag links in a line if tags exist or (else) to show nothing. The available if/else conditions are one of the great things when designing a template in Textpattern.

Multiple sites and domains with Pivot

The Working with Weblogs and Templates part of the Pivot documentation shows what makes Pivot so appealing to me.

Pivot has a versatile weblog structure, which features multiple weblogs, subweblogs and categories.If you want, you can maintain several weblogs with one installation of Pivot at the same time, even sharing or duplicating entries between these weblogs. You can also have multiple subweblogs on one page (most commonly in two or more columns). Pivot comes with one weblog pre-configured, and you can easily add more.

One of the main features of Pivot is that you can publish multiple weblogs at the same time. You, as a user, do not have to decide on which weblog you want to publish your entries. In fact: You can't, even if you wanted to.

And here comes the scoop:

With Pivot you can set up more than one weblog. Each weblog has one or more subweblogs. Each of these subweblogs publishes one or more categories.

Larger picture

To summarise all of this: Every user can write entries in one or more categories, and each weblog has one or more subweblogs, and each subweblog publishes one or more categories.

What I like most about the concept

• You are always working in the same and only one publishing environment.
• Importing and publishing RSS feeds is a breeze because of the [[rss]] template tag.
• By choosing the appropriate categories the article is automatically published on the right site.

This way building a blog network looks like an easy task.

What other software would you recommend for such a task?

Somebody here having experience with Pivot? Feedback very welcome!