Funky Locomotion mod adds an advanced variant of the vanilla piston that can push a wide variety of blocks that the regular piston can’t (including tile entities, ‘heavy blocks’ such as obsidian and ‘soft blocks’ such as torches and dust). It just needs a redstone signal and a block update (that may be caused by the redstone signal) to move. There is also a variant of this that can ‘pull’ blocks towards it (but can’t push unlike the sticky piston). You can right-click a side to rotate the pusher to that direction.
Download link: Funky Locomotion Mod for Minecraft 1.7.10