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.

Recently, a student of mine showed me a Twitter exchange between two prominent Joomla developers about this very phrase. The argument made was if you're good enough to actually do, you wouldn't have time to be teaching. The implied conclusion to that is if you're teaching, you clearly aren't a first rate designer/developer, and you have to teach to pay the bills.

We could carry this argument to this: if you are a first-rate designer/developer, you wouldn't have time to volunteer your services to work on the Joomla project, because you'd be too busy building sites for paying clients.

Obviously, that statement is not true. We are tremendously lucky to have very talented designers and developers volunteering their time to work on the Joomla project. If they weren't talented, Joomla wouldn't be among the top open source content management systems in the world.

Webology e-Business Solutions is doing a survey on the positives and negatives of Joomla and Drupal.

Read about the survey.

Take the survey.

Check out the Packt site to see how you can nominate your favorite CMS for a nice award.  Let's beat Drupal this year, shall we?

There's a new category, the CMS MVP, the person/people who have contributed tirelessly to their communities.  I nominated Barrie North for that -- good documentation of these systems is so hard to find.

"Stronger security" with Drupal. What, you mean Joomla can be more easily hacked?

Well, no, that's not typically what the Drupal people mean by this. As with all CMSs, the number one weak point for hacking is passwords that are easily cracked. Since that's all about human error, Joomla and Drupal are equally vulnerable in that regard.

The second weak point in the chain is making sure that your web developer updates your site quickly and efficiently to the latest "dot release" as they're released, rather than ignoring sites as our competitors frequently do. Open source CMSs are great in that they're free, and freely available, but it also means when a security vulnerability is found, everyone knows about it. When the latest security release comes out, you need to upgrade your CMS, no matter what package you're running, or you're more vulnerable to being hacked. We at 4Web include free upgrades for a year as part of our contract, and we stay on top of when new releases come out and get the upgrades done -- unlike many of our competitors. You do this on your Windows/Mac computer, often unseen, with little updates all the time (largely security-related). Your CMS software is really no different.

Just to respond to some misinformation floating around out there in the Drupal world. There is actually little difference between Drupal and Joomla these days. If anything, Joomla is growing faster than Drupal in adoption, interest, and usage. The amount of development for 3rd party extensions is stunning. Neither Drupal nor Joomla are going anywhere anytime soon, but Joomla is clearly the future-forward choice now that 1.5 stable has been released.

Responding to a colleague of mine from October 2007:

Editing in Joomla is as simple as logging in, clicking a pencil icon, making your changes, and saving. The end.