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.
Woody Allen made a whole movie but here you will find links to movies, presentations and articles. Thanks to the hard work of Jen Kramer and others for compiling this list of useful resources.
I will be making a presentation on Joomla! 1.6 at JoomlaDay Chile next week and will add it here. If you have any resources to add please post in the comments and I will add them.
I've said it before and I will say it again - I don't like Virtuemart as software for building ecommerce sites in joomla.
A tweet of mine is even being made into a t-shirt for me and I will wear it with pride.
This week, 21st to 27th November, is Inter Faith Week in England and Wales.
Wherever I go I am always asked why I am involved in Joomla! and why I give so much of my time to a piece of software. Working together with people across the world to produce software that will help, in some small way, activities like this take place is exactly what motivates me.
Of course I am excited to see large multi-national companies and government bodies using Joomla but it is when I see small charities or non-profit organisations able to organise events and spread their message, using Joomla, that I am really happy.
This month a survey by cmscrawler.com of 2,944,914 European web sites has been able to identify the publishing solution used in almost 494,040 of those sites.
Unlike other statistical analysis this was restricted to European TLD (top level domains) and does not limit itself to only testing sites in the top x million based on traffic.
Does that make it more accurate? Probably not but by removing the traffic filter it does allow us to look at the usage of web platforms more generally.
