Dancing Bear Syndrome is a term coined by Jared Spool and Alan Cooper (among others in the usability community). Someone says, "Look! A dancing bear!" And you are amazed! The bear is dancing! How cool is that?

Of course, bears don't dance well. It's just amazing that they dance at all. The novelty of it all is what catches our attention, not the quality of the dancing.

Alternative Joomla administrator templates are dancing bears.

The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits:

Earlier today I was working on a site with a single menu in the Menu Manager. That menu was split into a top navigation (the top level items) which would be image-based navigation (don't ask) and the left navigation would show the secondary and tertiary levels of nav, in the standard text format.

There were two templates on the site: a home page and an inside page.

There was one module running the primary nav everywhere, and the secondary nav modules changed with the section of the site.

So I was really surprised to see the main nav working on the home page -- you could see the images just fine -- but on most inside pages, the main nav bar wasn't visible because the images weren't displaying. Taking a peek at the source code, the images weren't even being written to the page!

To migrate from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5: That is the question

One of the big questions we get asked these days is whether it's worthwhile to upgrade from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5. As with all web design and development questions, the correct answer is: It Depends.

There are generally two schools of thought on this.

The "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It" school says that if you're site is working in Joomla 1.0, then why bother to migrate? It's doing what you want, so you don't need to change it. This certainly has some validity, in that you save money in the short term by not migrating.

Category and section blog layouts are essentially the same thing. For a given section, or for a given section/category, all content items will show up on the page in "blog" format.

Obviously, the blog format can be used for... well, blogging. But think bigger than that when applying this to your website. Blog, in this case, is a functionality, not a technology. We routinely use the blog format for press releases, for example. The format works for anything where a client needs to post items regularly, in some pre-defined order. It's also handy if the client is making new pages, because the client doesn't need to make a menu link to the item. It will simply publish on the page.

To make category/section blog layouts, go to the Menu manger and find the menu on which you want this link to live. Click New, then Articles, then select either section or category blog layout.

I really love Joomla! User Group New England. We meet the 3rd Wednesday of each month. And it's amazing what happens when you put so many intelligent people in one room -- the problems we solve!

Earlier that day, I was working on a site that had just been upgraded to Joomla 1.5.8. I noticed that a script tag I had included in a piece of content was getting stripped out when I saved the article.

Step 1: examine the wysiwyg pro settings. Wysiwyg Pro is our prefered editor for Joomla, as its usability is awesome for our clients. Of course, it hadn't been stripping out the script tag before, so why was it going now?

There has been some buzz lately about Flash version 10 breaking the media manager in Joomla. This won't be fixed until after 1.5.8 so what to do in the meantime? Since it only affects the media manager in the administrator, at least the problem only affects your staff. Your choices are to either wait to upgrade Flash until Joomla fixes the problem. If it's too late for that, all you need to do is disable the media manager's flash uploader. Go to "Global Configuration/System" and right at the bottom set "Enable Flash Uploader" to no. Who knows? Maybe you'll prefer this setting anyway!

If you would like to know what version of Flash you are running:

 http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507

Flash 10 was released with the new Adobe CS4. I'm sure it does wonderful things for Adobe... but it's breaking a lot of Flash-based image uploaders out there, including Joomla's in the Media Manager.

More information on the Joomla site.

Basically, the Joomla team says that they will not be fixing this problem in 1.5.7 or 1.5.8, but will address it after that.  

We are thrilled to announce that we've launched a HUGE site we've been working on for the last few months, WineMaker Magazine.

WineMaker Magazine started in 1998, and it's about how to make wine at home, whether you start with fresh grapes, or whether you start with a kit.  The main goal for the website is to push subscriptions and sell back issues of the magazine.  The content surrounding that supports those goals.

Because the site supports a magazine, it should contain an issue-by-issue listing of all articles.  Some of these articles may be available online, while some articles might be listed, but purchasing a back issue is required to read it.

Installing Joomla can be pretty intimidating if you've never done it before, and if you don't have experience with your web host's control panel, setting up a database, unzipping files, etc.

How you install Joomla goes something like this:

1. Get a domain name at a domain name registrar (GoDaddy, 000Domains, etc).
2. Get some web hosting. (MidPhase, BlueHost, eMarkHosting, there are many others)
3. Make the domain name point to the web hosting. Wait for propagation to happen (24-48 hrs usually, though shorter and longer times are common). When you can go to your domain name and get your site, you're ready to go to the next steps.
4. Log into your host's control panel.
5. Create a MySQL database and a database user, and make them talk to each other. (If you have CPanel installed as your control panel, there's a great wizard that walks you through the process.) Make note of your MySQL database username and password.
6. Download Joomla.You want the most recent 1.5 version. There's a link on the left side of the home page.
7. Upload the zipped copy of Joomla you just downloaded into your web hosting space.  Some control panels have a nice file manager that lets you do this pretty easily; otherwise, you'll need to use FTP.
8. Unzip the copy of Joomla.
9. Go to your website on the front end, i.e. www.mysite.com.  This will put you into the rest of the Joomla installation.
10. Follow the wizard. You'll pick your language, enter the database username and password, enter some FTP information, have the option of installing sample data, stuff like that.
11. Delete the installation directory from your website.
12. Now you're ready to configure Joomla.

Yes, I'm vague on a lot of details because so much depends on your individual web host.