What is Fusion News?
Fusion News is a free, news publishing system which will allow you to easily and effortlessly publish news onto your website. Unlike the majority of other similar software which require you to build your website around the software, Fusion News is designed to be used with an existing website. This is achieved by requiring you to only copy and paste small block of code into your website, which is automatically generated by Fusion News. This code will then display the news on your website!
Introductions.
Posted by Rthaggard on 11 July 2012 08:04.
EDIT by Blackshadow: unfortunately the news database was corrupted at some point, and this news post was lost. Please see Robert's post on the forum for a brief overview of what he said.
In answer to some questions
Posted by Blackshadow on 6 June 2012 20:51.
Some people have been asking me whether the Fusion News software will continue working after the website is being shut down. The answer to this is yes! The software will continue to work after the website has shutdown. The only problem I can forsee is the Help page will not show the latest available version. The only impact the shutting down of this website will cause is that support will no longer be available, and the software itself will no longer be receiving updates and fixes.
I have also decided that instead of letting the domain name expire, I will keep a placeholder page at this address referring the user to other alternatives instead of Fusion News. This is mainly to avoid other people from re-registering the domain name and using it for their own purposes.
If you have any other further questions, don't hesitate to ask me by emailing alex@fusionnews.net!
Alex
Tying up loose ends
Posted by Blackshadow on 7 May 2012 01:01.
Sorry if this post seems a little informal, but it's 1:42am and need to get this posted now.
It's been just over 7 months since my last update, and my frequency of updates isn't going to go up as far as I can tell. Not a lot of people know this, but I've been keeping Fusion News alive now since I was 16 (I'm now 21) and I would have to say that although I haven't accomplished everything I wanted to with FN, I'm happy to see that I have definitely improved it in terms of ease of use, and simplicity. When I first picked up the FN code, it was messy, it was broken in so many ways and it was riddled with security bugs. I poured countless hours of my time into fixing all these problems, and slowly added features which people wanted in FN. And it was fun while it lasted.
However, between university, life and everything else that has been going on for the past few months and even years, I haven't had the time nor the motivation to continue developing and maintaining Fusion News. So I regret to inform you that I will not be continuing the development of Fusion News. All things must come to an end, and for Fusion News to have lasted for 11 years through various developers, I think, is a great achievement, and although its popularity died down around 2005, it's had a good run.
There is another reason for my decision to stop development. For a number of years, websites have been tending towards using content management systems to build their websites, and these often make it a lot easier to post news on your website. Software such as WordPress, or Blogger make this a lot easier, and for Fusion News to compete with either of these is pointless. If you still wish to maintain your website by hand using HTML, or hand-crafted PHP then there is still an alternative - CuteNews has been around for about as long as Fusion News has, and it is a great substitute and in many ways better than FN. They have an active community, and there are a number of dedicated members on their forums who are always willing to help.
So unfortunately, this is the end of the road for Fusion News. I really would have liked to get a working version 4.0 which has supposedly been 'coming soon' for the past 6 years, but it looks like this will never happen now. I will leave the website here until September when the domain name expires, and the support forum will also stay put until then. Hopefully this will be enough time for everyone to jump ship and update their websites with a new news management system. I strongly suggest anyone still in the stone ages, and not using a CMS such as WordPress, to start using one (unless of course you really know what you're doing) as this will save you a lot of headaches and hassle.
It was certainly fun while it lasted, and I would like to thank everyone for their suggestions, ideas and support for the past few years. Unless you wish to take over development of Fusion News, then this will be it from me. If you wish to contact me, then you can do so via the forums, or by sending me an email at alex@fusionnews.net.
Thank you again to everyone!
~ Alex
Testing 3.9.7
Posted by Blackshadow on 31 October 2011 17:01.
It's again been far to long since the last update, but I've managed to get around to working on it again. Version 3.9.7 is pretty much finished now, I just need to test it and then it's ready to go. I figure the testing will go much faster if I can automate a majority of it, and this is what I'll be doing from now until Christmas time, which is when I plan to release 3.9.7.
There's nothing major to report in terms of new additions. 3.9.7 mainly incorporates a number of bug fixes, as well as a potential exploit.
Expected downtime
Posted by Blackshadow on 25 July 2011 15:39.
I've recently transferred the FusionNews.net domain name, so there may be some down time within the next 5 days while the domain is being transferred. If all goes well, there won't be any downtime at all 
Forum registration
Posted by Blackshadow on 25 July 2011 14:14.
I've recently increased the difficulty of the anti-spambot measures on the forum registration page. If you have any problems with registering an account, please email me at alex@fusionnews.net.
Still alive, and UTF-8 support
Posted by Blackshadow on 16 April 2011 15:35.
Progress has once again slowed right down, but I've been on Easter holidays for the past 2 weeks now, and I've managed to get some more done on Fusion News
One of the major changes is the support for UTF-8 encoded characters. Different languages often use different characters from the latin alphabet, so they must use different encodings in order to fit them into a single byte (and thus have a maximum of 256 characters). UTF-8 is an encoding which can represent the entire latin alphabet, as well as every other alphabet used in other languages, and it does this by using multiple bytes to represent a single character. However, PHP assumes that all characters are single bytes, and therefore cannot handle the multibyte representation used by UTF-8. The added functions in Fusion News will correct this problem, so that characters can use multiple bytes, and will be handled correctly.
A problem related to this, is characters not being displayed correctly on websites, even though it looks right in the Fusion News control panel. This goes back to the use of different encodings. By default, the Fusion News control panel handles everything as UTF-8 text. But most websites will often use a different encoding such as iso-8859-15, or windows-1252, so outputting text which was originally UTF-8 will look incorrect. To solve this, Fusion News will now output characters as HTML entities, and hopefully (fingers crossed!), this should solve any problems with the wrong text being displayed!
Hopefully I can post some more progress in the next week or two, before my Easter holiday finishes.
Website changes and 3.10 updates
Posted by Blackshadow on 12 February 2011 16:56.
It's been a long time since I've posted anything, so now seems like a good time to post 
I've changed the font size for the website as I thought the previous size was too big, and the new size looks better in my opinion. It still remains readable and it makes better use of screen real-estate! Aside from the website layout, I've been busy working on what will be Fusion News 3.10. There won't be any major feature additions, or any noticeable changes in functionality (at least not that I've planned for yet), but it's mainly a reorganising of the code, and of the files.
In the future (not 3.10), I plan on removing the fullnews.php file as it currently doesn't serve much purpose - it only displays the extended version of the short news. The comments page does exactly this, as well as displaying the comments for the post. Other news publishing applications, such as WordPress, have a single page for displaying the extended news, as well as the comments, and doing it this way makes things simpler for me, and for the site visitors.
I'm happy to take suggestions for additions, or changes to Fusion News for 3.10, or for later releases (if I don't have time to add it to 3.10), as well as any criticism you have! Just add a comment
Fusion News 3.9.6-p1 Released
Posted by Blackshadow on 28 December 2010 18:05.
This release, 3.9.6-p1 (or patch 1), fixes two bugs in the 3.9.6 release. These are the ones which prevent the WYSIWYG editor from displaying, and also where smiley images inserted by the WYSIWYG editor produces a broken image.
See the forum topic for the change log.
The new release can be downloaded from our downloads page.
Fusion News 3.9.6 and Christmas
Posted by Blackshadow on 24 December 2010 15:51.
Merry Christmas everybody! I hope that you are all well and with friends and family. I'm very happy to announce the release of Fusion News 3.9.6! This release continues the tradition of having a number of bugs fixed, as well as some minor improvements made here and there. The main improvement is the addition of a WYSIWYG editor, which means that you are no longer required to use plain HTML, or use BBCode. This will make formatting your news posts much easier, and will hopefully mean that more people will be able to make use of Fusion News.
An unfortunate consequence of adding ths WYSIWYG editor however, is that if you do enable it, all your previous posts may need to be edited slightly in order to keep the correct formatting. This is because the editor outputs HTML, and all paragraphs are correctly enclosed in <p></p> tags. Before now, Fusion News would automatically convert line breaks in the text editor to <br> tags even if HTML was enabled. However doing this with HTML is meaningless as line breaks must be created using <br> tags. So enabling the WYSIWYG editor will require you to properly recreate these line breaks through the editor. Hopefully it won't cause too many problems, but any questions about this, or about the new release can be asked in our support forums.
For a full list of changes, see the new release topic.
Alternatively, you can download the new version from our downloads page.
Finally, I'd like again to say Merry Christmas to everybody, and thank everyone for continuing to support Fusion News even when progress does seem a bit slow
EDIT: I am aware of a bug with inserting smileys into the news by using the WYSIWYG editor. A small fix will be released after Christmas - in the mean time, you can continue using the old style text smileys.
