Today is July 1st, 2009 and marks the official launch date of TejasVapin.com. We’re on target but you might be asking; what took so long? I wanted to build the basic framework for our own community and eventually allowing Tejas Vapin to move away from ECF as our main portal for information and interaction. That had to be done before too much activity on the site was encouraged. You may have noticed I had even taken down the announcement on ECF about the site’s launch date. Yet we still have had a few members sign up. That’s a good thing as it allowed for some key testing without being overwhelming.
I’m not suggesting we dump ECF, no way! We’ll always have a home on ECF as long as they’ll have us. The reality is we also need our own space on the web for several reasons. Our local suppliers can’t advertise within our social forum on ECF. On our own site we can organize group meetups better because we can have separate pages for each chapter or local area. Eventually we should have more members here because lot of people would rather keep tabs on a regular site rather than a forum.
I want to take a moment to send a shout out to Trinity, a local supplier who owns VapeMeister. He suggested a plugin for the site after I had mentioned that I wanted a way to add more user fields to registration showing the user’s location to make it easier in organizing the different charter areas, etc. While I didn’t choose that plugin it did lead me in the right direction to set up a community framework. In the future we’ll be able to add user fields and implement a forum that will integrate user data. We’ll also have the ability for an in-house instant messaging system. All that is not important in the early stages but will become a need as the group grows.
What Texas Vapers Say