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.

I was recently asked if there was a way to get the topmost menu item in which a page sits. Let's say you have a menu like this:

Item 1
--Item 1.1
--Item 1.2
----Item 1.2.1
Item 2
--Item 2.1
--Item 2.2

Let's say you wanted to do something special with all the menus in the 'Item 1' tree and something slightly different for all the items in the 'Item 2'  tree. You'd want to know which tree you were on. Here is a bit of simple php code you can use the get the top most menu item no matter where in the navigation you are (see php 4 version further down):

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:

In honor of the new Lynda.com Joomla Templates videos that have been released, I'm going to do a series of blog posts on cool tips and tricks for your Joomla templates.

First up, something easy: how to display your site name within the template.

The site name is entered when installing Joomla. It's used in the back end of Joomla, in the administrator screens (typically in a black bar near the top of the page).   It's used if your site is offline in the default "site is offline" display screen as well.

I just got back from a week in Ventura, CA, working for Lynda.com.  If you don't know them, they are one of the best training resources out there for most things related to web development.  Way back at Dreamweaver 3 and Photoshop 5.5, I learned these programs via Lynda.com Hands-On Training books.  They've since put a huge emphasis on their online training video library. The videos are fantastic and very helpful for explaining how to do just about anything in the Adobe or web world.

Back in June, Lynda.com made their first push into the Joomla world with Joe LeBlanc's Joomla 1.5 Essential Training. They've been hearing requests for template and CSS training ever since.  I contacted them about the time the Essentials video came out, and I've been working on developing two sets of movies for them.

The  first course recorded was "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates."  This just focuses on how to transform your static HTML page to a Joomla template and goes over some common errors and problems you might have installing your templates.

Once we had decided against using sh404sef, we were still left with the need to handle '404 Page Not Found' errors. Clear and explicit information on this wasn't particularly easy to find, so I thought I'd document how we did it here.

 In J!15, errors are normally handled by - surprise! - a template file. Look in the the system template folder for the file error.php. Standard J!15 error handling sends the user to this page for any unrecoverable error. Including 404 errors. If you copy this file to the root folder of your own template, you can then modify it to your needs.

In very simplified form, here is what we did:

Creating a template override can be very simple or highly complex. It will depend on the Joomla core generation code you want to override and what you want to do. A relatively simple example that has been requested often in 4Web's work removes those pesky row numbers in the weblinks listing.

Normally, the listing of weblinks within a category will display something like this:

#	Web Link	Hits
1	Joomla! Home of Joomla!	3

Most of the elements in this display can be shown or hidden. The exception is the '#' column. First we identify the generation code.

We've been asked by the Joomla! Magazine people to write an article about our MassAcorn website. It features all layouts done with a single template, among other cool features. We also used some great free extensions which we'll also discuss.  We're pretty excited!  It will be out in the August issue.

When you include a module position in your Joomla 1.5 template, the code looks something like this:

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="left" style="xhtml" /> 

This means that this is a module, with a position of left and a style of XHTML.  

You've been designing your new website, creating a template to your client's specifications. All is going well. They are making use of the weblinks component for publishing their list of favorite links. They call up and say, "we really don't like seeing those numbers in the left column, please take those away." Looking for all the available configuration options, you discover that you can do anything you want on that page except get rid of those pesky numbers!

Template overrides to the rescue!

Every component and module in Joomla has a particular snippet of code called a template, whose job is to generate HTML and nothing else. The Joomla framework is designed to allow templates to replace those snippets as needed. You can build a template that completely takes over the writing of almost all html on the site using these overrides.