One of the complaints I've seen often about Joomla is that the registration process on your site doesn't gather enough data. As supplied it's restricted to asking for just the name and email address which for many people is just not enough.
As a result people have resorted to installing something like Community Builder just for the enhanced registration form without using any of the additional "social" features that Community Builder offers.
That's just using a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Read more: Enhanced User Profiles with Joomla - Don't use a hammer
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks you will know that the largest international gathering of the Joomla development community took place at the beginning of the month in Kerkrade, The Netherlands.
Rather than write a report on the event in the immediate aftermath I thought I would wait a while and try and allow some time to get my thoughts in order. Of course the opportunity to sober up and grab more than 2 hours sleep would also help.
Almost every day I'm asked why I am involved in Joomla, what is my motivation and what gets me excited. I know some people get excited and feel a sense of validation when they see big global names building a web site with Joomla but I don't.
For me it is seeing people all over the world working together not just for their own benefit but for the benefit of others and a greater global good.
As many of you know I spend a large percentage of my time teaching people how to use Joomla. Sometimes that is for people who are complete Joomla virgins but more often than not it is for people who have had a Joomla web site built for them and now they want to know how to use it.
Perhaps the biggest problem these people face is that the web site they have had built for them has not been built the Joomla way. As a result the site will often have a complicated structure that is difficult to understand and manage, definitely not what Joomla is designed to be.
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?
Today I'm turning the blog over to you.
Inspired by a facebook post by Jono Bacon, just use the comments to say where and when we've met. Of course if you have something more interesting to say about it feel free to do so and perhaps even link to a photo or video.
Just one small beer too many and crazy ideas start to sound sensible. I'm sure you've all been there and had an idea in a drunken moment that in the light of the day perhaps isn't such a "no-brainer" after all.
That's exactly what happened during JoomlaDay Chile.
During Javier's presentation on OSM and the power of Open Source software he talked about his experience couch surfing and I suggested to Ryan Ozimek that we could probably travel the world, couch surfing and visiting Joomla communities as we travelled.
Ryan, being the big vision thinker that he is, not only embraced the idea but started to think about the possibilities and practical issues.
This is the first of several blog posts inspired by my recent trip to Joomla Day in Chile.
I began my keynote presentation in Santiago with an apology that the presentation would be in English. Being British I have a very poor appreciation of the importance of speaking any language other than English. Even at school the French I was taught would not really help me with conversational French (and even then I was not a very good student).
There is an English joke that if you speak loud enough and slow enough then everyone in the world will understand you but that simply is not true.
