Fusion is a PHP/MySQL based framework which aids in the rapid development of web applications and websites. Fusion handles many challenges developers face in building truly comprehensive websites such as templating, fancy urls, dynamic settings, automating tasks, user level security, editing and administrative interfaces. All within a compact and modular framework.

The goal of Fusion is to offer an upgradable and expandable core that takes each project to a higher level of interactivity. With Fusion, a developer can focus on building out unique functionality while the framework handles the rest.  Fusion is currently powering numerous websites, including this one.

Why Fusion?

Traditional CMS’ are generally inflexible and designed to be used a certain way. For example, you use WordPress to build blog-like sites. Fusion is a development base and doesn’t lock you into a narrow paradigm. We use Fusion to build each web portal, blog, message board, twitter clone, database browser or anything else you can imagine. If it can build well with PHP,Fusion is used to make it great.

Designed for Expandability

Fusion leverages plugin architecture which allows you to encapsulate features across multiple sites. At this point, 131Digital offers 20 plugins developed for Fusion and we’re adding more all the time. Of course, this approach makes it easy to manage your code and keep everything updated with minimal risk of breakage.

Examples of 131Digital popular plugins:

Pages

Pages provides a rich enviroment for editing and manipulating content live on the web. Pages works much as you’d expect, providing a rich text editor that allows you to build out fully functional pages, complete with powerful image uploading and maniuplation, categories, and slugs. We leverage TinyMCE as our WYSIWYG in-browser editor for the best-in-class online editing experience.

Sniplets

Sniplets work much in the same way as Pages does since it provides a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to upload images, embed content, and other nifty features. The main difference is, where Pages will dedicate an entire browser page to your content, Sniplets can be placed in any HTML or PHP output anywhere on a page. You can use multiple sniplets per page, or even the same sniplet over and over!

One of the main issues developers experience when building complex designs and layouts (say, the 131Digital homepage) is mixing dynamic content and static HTML elements together while maintaining client editability. Sniplets provides all this, with a simple interface to boot.

Navigation

Navigation provides a dead simple method to edit navigation menus with clean CSS sub-menus, all manageable in the each backend ‘CCP’. The Navigation plugin also provides a hook for other plugins to be able to handle menu elements. For example, our shopping system uses this hook to build a dynamic category selection right in to the menu!

Shop

Shop is the 131Digital e-commerce platform, designed to handle multiple usage scenarios. Some of our clients use this system to manage inventory, while others leverage it’s comprehensive warehouse drop-shipping support to run online retail outlets without ever maintaining an inventory. Shop’s intelligent shipping calculator will handle an order with items shipping from multiple locations, it will contact warehouses upon order confirmation and actually order the products for you. It even handles wholesale database importing and parsing, leaving you to focus on less complicated things. Shop also supports in-store pickups, payment processing (Authorize.net at the moment, Google Checkout and Paypal coming soon!) Finally it doesn’t require shoppers to create an account to purchase items.

JQuery Plugin

The JQuery Plugin offers a wide array of in-browser animation techniques, compatibility hacks for lesser browsers (Looking at you, IE) and some of the more popular JQuery Plugins to enable a rich browsing experience for all of your viewers. With really good built-in support for Ixedit, you don’t have to be a javascript genius to make eye popping sites! However, If you are a JS guru, it’s light weight and non bloated so it won’t get in the way.

You get the idea.

That’s just a taste, we haven’t even touched on our Single source Social Marketing interface, SEO offerings, RSS plugins, xml sitemap generator, galleries, internal advertising systems or our backup plugin that allows site owners to create full site backups on the fly (zips the site source and sql dump for download).

Availability

At this time, only 131Digital provides this framework. While considering how you want to proceed with your internet needs feel free to contactus@131digital.com for additional information.