Exciting news! S-CARS.ORG has made its way to YouTube. Join our growing community of S-CAR enthusiasts as we share ownership adventures, expert insights, and primarily C4 S4/S6 and D2 S8 content. Get ready to fuel your passion for these cars in a whole new way. Subscribe to our channel today!
RS5
Click here to register your user ID on our site.
We admit it. We’re old. Well, in “web years” I guess we’re pretty darn old. This site was born back on May 8th, 1998 and if you’re a long time member you know it has gone through several redesigns over the years. How things have changed!
We’ve been running the old PostNuke based site for what seems like forever and it is well past time to move on for a number of reasons. We’re now running a far more user friendly back-end and looking to do more with the web site in 2013. We’re also looking for writers, bloggers or anyone who would enjoy taking an active role in building the S-Cars community.
“S” is for social? No, not entirely but you will notice that you can now make friend connections with follow owners and can even post activity updates about what you’re up to with you car(s). I encourage you to jump right in and give it a whirl. Dive into the forums as well and start some discussions. We REALLY need help from you, the enthusiasts, to make this site all that it can be.
In closing, we’d like to extend a special thanks to the S and RS car owners and enthusiasts who make this site what it is. We’ve been known for our more mature and level headed users over the years and we hope to see that trend continue. Thanks and enjoy!
Darin Nederhoff
Founder, S-CARS.ORG
P.S. – It has come to our attention that Internet Explorer users may encounter some site compatibility issues when trying to view the web site. Prior to sending out our update e-mail the site was tested with Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari via iPhone and it seemed to be about the same in each. Since then however it appears that we’ve got an issue which is causing the registration and login box along with site menu and polls to vanish from the right side of the screen.
We’re looking for the cause of this issue but in the meantime if you’ve got another web browser at your disposal we’d suggest using it to view the site. You’ll be missing out if you don’t.
Finally, since the registration link is missing for IE users, you can do so directly via this URL: https://s-cars.org/register
Yes, that would be a comment I am sure more than a few of you would scream at me. S-CARS.ORG appeared to be flat-lining, on a decline much like the U.S. economy. What WAS left of it was quite the mess thanks to a messy relocation from one server to another. It was a rough stretch I tell ya!
Quite some time ago I had been diligently working on an all new version of the web site. In fact, it was originally my intent to debut the site on the 10th anniversary of it’s creation. Well, numerous tech issues prevented that from happening. The site actually went through two evolutions in private before what you see here was released to the public. I really wanted the new site to be less cluttered than what we had before, and that led to lots of experimentation. In fact, two versions of the site were developed using a Joomla back-end but both wound up being a bit more complex than I wanted the site to be. What to do?
Well, during my down-time I happened to create a little test site for one of my other interests, Panasonic Bicycles. During one weekend of boredom and experimentation with WordPress I created the basis for the Panasonic Bicycles Virtual Museum which can be seen here. Before I knew it, the site had gotten to be more popular than I could have imagined (especially considering Panasonic hasn’t sold bikes here in North America since 1989.)
The beauty of the new site besides the fact that it was suddenly starting to match the S-CARS.ORG web site in terms of traffic, was that it was so easy to manage. Heck, I could even update it from my iPhone in a matter of minutes. It was simple and it worked.
The only problem was that I doubted it would be robust enough to handle all of the content that comprised what was S-CARS.ORG. And to be honest, as I write this I am still in the process of moving content from our old PostNuke based content management system to this new site, so we may still crash and burn yet! With a little luck and some organizational planning I think we’ll be able to make it happen though.
Now the cool part! In the past it was tricky for our other site editors to deal with the publishing of content. PostNuke didn’t exactly have a WYSIWYG editor so you had to be at least a little savvy with HTML. Our new platform will allow just about ANY S or RS nut to easily publish stories, blogs, etc. to the web site. Yes, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Top Gear may have The Stig, but we’ve got something even more perplexing… some say it comes from a warehouse deep within the forests of Bavaria where century old Trolls feast on it like flies to compost. All we know is that they are the S-CARS Site Editorial Crew! Stay tuned for the official introductions soon!
Thanks for hanging in there… and it was indeed about time!
Darin Nederhoff
Founder & Managing Editor, S-CARS.ORG
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