"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains.

The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."
William Arthur Ward 

Six years ago today I sent a short email to just over 100 people.

Whilst the words may not go down in history with the words of Neil Armstrong or others their results have had an effect on the lives of people in every country in the world. Something that I don't think any one of us could have predicted.

This weekend all the joomla leadership teams, including OSM, are gathering in San Jose, California to discuss numerous issues effecting the future directions and goals of the project.

It's really great to see so many people travelling across the world in their own free time to meet up and consider the future path of our project.

You have probably noticed that this web site uses the awesome component K2 to deliver the content that you are reading instead of the default Joomla com_content component.

But did you know that to truly make it work you need a web host that understand exactly how to configure a web server to work with it?

When I gave the first presentation of "Joomla Hidden Secrets" in The Netherlands back in 2009 I stated that I was only presenting some of the "secrets" and that I would present more in the future. Well, for various reasons, I never did.

This week a tweet by Rafael Diaz-Tushman of Dioscouri Design complaining that joomlacode.org was exposing his email address in unprotected form to spammers etc prompted me to reveal at least one more of my "Hidden Secrets of Joomla".

As Joomla is free of cost to download and install should support for it also be free of cost? The same is also true of extensions for Joomla, if it is free of cost to download can you expect the support for it to be free?

Everyday on twitter I see Joomla extension developers moaning about the "unrealistic" expectations of users asking, or even demanding, free technical support.

Everyday on twitter I see Joomla users moaning about the lack of free technical support for the Joomla extension they have just downloaded.

Are users right to expect technical support, are developers right to moan about "stupid" users, or should we all be grateful for what we got and shut up?

At the end of October I had the great honour to present the keynote session at the first ever Joomla!Day Denmark. It was a fantastic event with almost 200 people attending over 2 days in the picturesque city of Kolding.

The venue itself was the IBC school which was unlike any school I've ever been to. If my school had provided such a relaxed atmosphere perhaps I would have concentrated harder.

Several months ago the "new" OSM board published a set of accounts.

At the time many people in the community questioned the amount of money that was being spent on Legal and PR agency fees.

Today I saw that OSM have published an updated set of accounts and I'm really pleased with what I saw.

The amount of money being spent on Legal and PR have been drastically reduced. Thank you OSM for listening to the community and taking action.

I thought long and hard about what to write for this Birthday blog post.

I started to look back at the early days, back in September and October 2005, to see if the aims and ideas of the co-founders have come to fruition.

Then I realised that we had no grand aims of world domination just a desire to work together with a wider community to build something special.

We are used to communication being secure

If we phone with our mobiles, we assume that only the people we dialled can hear us.

When transferring money we provide information via the bank's web page and we trust that nobody else can use that information to withdraw money from our accounts.