follow the money Joomla 1.6 is all about the CASH

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?

Where did we meet?