Welcome to COPA 2.0

Well, it is nearly 7 years to the day since COPA was announced to membership of SR20.org, and with it came an amazing new website, the creation of the brilliant and dedicated Steve Lin.  Well, it has taken a team laboring for a year to find a successor to Steve's creation, and here it is.  It is again the result of much volunteer work, including vital assistance from Steve, but also many, many hours from Bob (Turbo) Anderson, Tim Gieseler, Alan Grose, Blaine Iler, Sanjay Saigal, and others.  We also employed the assistance of Couto Solutions, referred to us by COPA member Tom Spaulding.

The result is COPA 2.0, a new modern platform that should carry COPA for the next 7 years.  It is remarkable to look back on that announcement and realize there were only 200 Cirrus airplanes in owners hands.  Today there are nearly 20 times that number.  With that growth have come many new needs to support our nearly 3000 strong membership.  I hope you will enjoy exploring COPA 2.0. 

The system we have deployed today is actually a very minimalist implementation; our focus has been on bringing all our members, systems, posts and messages over with the best fidelity possible.  We will from this point start to explore the new capabilities our new platform offers.  But as a general overview, here are some of the high points of what we have undertaken:

• Stable modern software platform to support future growth.  Old system was teetering on technological brink of disaster.
• Improved editor for creating posts with formatting, easily imbedded images, etc.
• Vastly improved search capability and display of results
  
• Support for fine-grained topic forums while preserving ability to see big picture of site traffic
• Integrated Event Calendar with automatic updating from registration system
• Blogs to organize and highlight contributions from distinctive points of view
  
• Improved accessibility and future integration of COPApedia
• Improved access to COPA-provide information archives
• Media libraries for photos, documents, videos
• Tools to facilitate member-based management of site content
• RSS feeds can create custom stream of posts to personalized readers
  
• Email feeds to automatically push desired forum posts
• Community tools to easily filter out content that matches your interests.
• Personalize your own Profile pages to show your interests, favorites, etc.
• 'Friends' capability to connect members of common interests
• Greatly improved flexibility and adaptability of site as content is developed
• Support for multiple subscription options for members, CFI's, vendors, etc.
  
• Reduced support requirements for lost passwords, lost usernames, cookie problems, etc.
• Support for moderation tools to implement COPA posting guidelines

There is much more to be said about each of these topics.  We have created two special forums to ease the transition.  One is the "Need Help Logging In" forum, which if you have gotten this far you won't be needing again.  The other is the "New Website Help & Discussion" forum.  As you have questions that is the place to go, and if you've figured out something, that is the place to share it!  So again, welcome to COPA 2.0, and happy exploring.