What is Fusion News?
Fusion News is a 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!
1, 2, 3, 4...that's the version we're going for
Posted by Blackshadow on 11 August 2010.
After looking back into the origins of Fusion News, and seeing how things were done then, compared to how they're done now, perhaps I haven't kept everyone up to date as much as I should have! I know it's been a very long time since the last Fusion News release, and I've been neglecting to post any updates on the progress of the next version.
I'm going to try and be a bit more active now, by trying to post updates every few weeks or so. So here's the first of the updates.
I've decided on making the next release Fusion News 4.0. Yes, this will delay the release even further, but I feel it's necessary to give Fusion News a complete update. Some may have noticed I keep going on about how the code is a mess, and it's true. And no amount of well-thought out addition of code to add new features (which is what I've been doing for the past few years) is going to change that. The code has to be redone. And this is what I have been doing for the past few months. Users of Fusion News won't notice the difference (at least not initially), but it will make additions and changes to the code easier and faster. It will also make it easier for you to make changes yourself! If you're interested to see what changes I've made to the code, you can take a look at the code in the SVN.
However, one (perhaps minor) downside to this change, is the minimum PHP version will be increased from 4.3.0 to 5.0.0. PHP5 has been out for over 6 years now, so there should (hopefully) be no problem with making this change, as web host providers really should have made the upgrade by now! If your provider doesn't support PHP5, then I don't see any reason why you can't ask them to upgrade :)
On the features side of things, once the code has been rewritten (or perhaps I'll do it in sections), old bugs fixed, etc, I'll start adding the new features. Some planned features:
- WYSIWYG editor for news posts
- Friendly URLs for news posts
- Tags (and tag clouds)
- Commenting will save the user's details (name, email, etc)
- Adding CAPTCHA to the Tell a Friend feature
So that's the plan! I don't know when I'll have time to write the next update, but hopefully before the end of the month.
New Site Design!
Posted by Blackshadow on 7 August 2010.
If you haven't noticed already, we have a new site design! I felt the previous one was getting old, and didn't really look all that good. This new design is much cleaner, and I hope you will agree with me too!
There is likely to be some remnants of the old site about the site, so if you do find anything out of place, please leave a comment on this post, or reply in the specially created topic here:
http://fusionnews.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1309
Any further suggestions for improvements are also welcome.
Steady progress
Posted by Blackshadow on 19 June 2010.
I'd just like to say that steady progress is being made on the next release. The main reason there's been such a delay is mainly due to fact I have been busy with university work the past few months, but also due to long needed major (code) changes that Fusion News requires.
Some of these changes will hopefully make customizing the news/comments/etc a lot easier, and will make it easier later on to add new features or make changes to Fusion News.
More updates will be posted as more progress is made!
Merry Chistmas, and 3.10
Posted by Blackshadow on 25 December 2009.
We, the Fusion News team wish you a merry Christmas! We hope you all have a great day with friends and family.
We've been busy working on creating Fusion News 3.10, which will include a lot of improvements such as better multi-lingual support, and general user interface improvements. We don't have a release date just yet but as we near completion of 3.10 we'll be able to give you a better idea.
Demonstration Fixed
Posted by Blackshadow on 14 October 2009.
If you've recently tried using the demo you would have found it's no longer there! It seems the person providing the demo for no longer has it there. So I've spent some time just now fixing up a new demo hosted on this very site. You can find the new demo by clicking the Demo link in the navigation bar.
