Hahaha, not really. The site www.codejdm.net went online on August 1st 2008 as I promised exactly 3 weeks before on the Superstreetonline website. A site that hopefully will unite the European clubs to one big community. I planned long before starting something like this, and I also planned long before using a ready to use CMS for the website. I was pending between LDU and some of the ASP.NET starter kits. After some time passed I decided that LDU is not really what I wanted to use not because it is developed with PHP and MySQL but because I started of thinking how it would be to use a starter kit and extend it myself. This would be an easy task in ASP.NET. Looking for the desired components like a gallery module and all those CMS stuff I could not really find a gallery module that works with the CMS available with ASP.NET. So I decided to write my own CMS.

I bet 98% of the people reading this article now roll with their eyes thinking "Oh fuck another idiot developing another CMS which will be the next 5 years beta. Aren't there already enough well working CMS?". Come on be honest. Maybe the words will vary but the essence of your thoughts is to 100% what I've written above.

And to answer your question yes it's necessary to develop my own CMS in ASP.NET and yes it was great fun and it was done in exactly 21 days. And the result can be viewed here at www.codejdm.net. And of course most of you will look for bugs, errors or things that doesn't work and I can understand that people try to make others work bad but that's ok for me. The only reason why I did do this CMS was to learn the single parts of a portal and I did and still do. The past three weeks were a learning process for me. I had to work on so many different parts that it was pure fun.

Here is a short list of what I did:

• custom membership provider for the user objects in my database
• custom role provider for the different roles in my application
• a forum allowing the usual functionality with administration
• a private messages module to allow users within this application to send messages
• a news section for writing news articles with thumbnails using FCKeditor for user input
• an articles section for writing articles for various article categories and assigning picture galleries
• an event section for allowing users to enter events and show them on the calendar (Control was taken from the ASP.NET Club starter kit )
• an user rides section where users can create a ride profile and enter a description and pictures for their rides. Other users can rate and comment those rides.

that was a short "features" list. Technical tricks like caching and other ASP.NET techniques are also used and a complete administration for all the points above was also created.

The good and bad thing is that I'm not finished. You are never finished with something which grows big. So I'm not.

I'm very proud of what I did and therefore I thought it would be cool to write these lines here to inform my regular two readers of this blog.

Something new is coming. You love fast cars? You erect when hearing motor sound? There are two types of people. Those who see a car as a convenient mode of transportation from point A to point B and the rest of us who are reading this article. We spend the majority of our time trying to decide how to get from point A to point B faster, more stylishly and a little differently than the next guy. If you belong to the second part of the people and love japanese cars than check out the site www.codejdm.net

Yep this one is for you and will open its doors soon...

My shopping list "Made in JDM" was updated. I placed orders at bestJDMparts and Password:JDM and have so the list was completed.

What I noticed since I'm importing my stuff I need is the big difference between the customer service in Germany and outside. I recently stepped over an article at msn.com which talked about the customer service hall of shame. You can read this article here.

The difference I'm talking about is that every time I placed an order at the USA and needed the support I was given the feeling that I would be the king. That's all about. The service staff at all companies I placed orders, were very helpful, very kind, very patient.

Here is an example. The online shop of Password:JDM doesn't handle international orders (sadly), so I noticed a link to an online chat with the service staff. After a few seconds the service staff answered and wanted to help me out placing my order. I had some questions since I also wanted to buy apparel and he took the time (we are talking about over half an hour) and went with me through all the products I wanted to purchase. This is great and at this place a big thanks to the Password:JDM team for that help. I know my English is not that good but he didn't care about this.

Same thing with the service people at Kingmotorsports Unlimited. Before placing my order I had a question and so I sent an email to the service team. After some hours it was already answered with details and so I placed my order online. A few hours later I received two emails. The first told me that my order was received and will be processed immediately and the second told me that they changed my shipping method to a more cheap and also fast shipping method. Isn't it great? In other words they helped me saving money!!!

These are only two examples and I made a lot more so I can only say... Great!!! The customer service at the USA is really really great. Other companies here in Europe could and should learn a lot from overseas. I can recommend you any of the shops listed in my post about "Shopping Made in JDM". Cool parts, fast shipping, fair prices and most important for me... excellent service!