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.
