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!
Testing 3.9.7
Posted by Blackshadow on 31 October 2011 18:01.
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 16:39.
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 15:14.
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 16:35.
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 17:56.
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 19:05.
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 16:51.
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.
Update on 3.9.6
Posted by Blackshadow on 25 November 2010 23:32.
I've made fairly good progress on the next version of Fusion News, fixing a number of bugs which I'd completely forgotten about and have come up on the forums. A new addition for the next version however, is a WYSIWYG editor, which can be seen below.
I don't plan to add anything else yet, and any new ideas will now be deferred until the version after this. The remainder of the time will be spent fixing bugs, and just preparing everything for what should be the most polished version of Fusion News yet!
Upcoming update for 3.9.x
Posted by Blackshadow on 17 November 2010 23:41.
It's been longer than I'd hoped before an update, but nevertheless, here it is. FN4 is coming along steadily still, but I've recently had a fair few university assignments to complete within the next coming weeks, and so FN4 has been put to the side for now. This doesn't mean all work is stopping on Fusion News though! I've decided to go back to 3.9.5 to fix some bugs which have accumulated over the past year, and to make a minor release (3.9.6). So expect this release within the next 2 or 3 weeks.
Design choices
Posted by Blackshadow on 6 October 2010 16:31.
This post is going to be a bit more technical than other posts I've made in the past, so it's probably better aimed at coders. You'll probably have noticed it's been fairly quiet recently here, and I thought I ought to at least post something.
The main reason for the lack of posts is because the university semester has started again, and I've been busy with that. The other, and perhaps more interesting, reason is because I've been thinking about how to improve Fusion News' code structure. I've been looking at several PHP frameworks, to get some idea about how other PHP applications structure their code, and I wanted mainly to look for something that would allow for rapid development, and fairly low maintenance. The main aspect of almost all of them, was they adopted the MVC architecture. The difference between all of them however, was the complexity in which they followed the architecture. Some had a many lines of code, for each part of the triad, and in comparison, some had very little lines of code for each. For Fusion News, I'm hoping to adopt a fairly lightweight structure throughout. This goes hand-in-hand with the rapid development, and once the supporting code is finished, will allow me to easily create new pages (or in this case, recreate pages in the new code), so that I can get some sort of release out the door sooner, rather than later.
The next post will hopefully report some progress, and will likely be next month now. Also, any comments are welcome!
