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.

Great news for Joomla developers! Elance, a site putting clients in touch with freelancers, says that the 8th most popular freelance skill out there is Joomla. PHP came in at #1, MySQL at #4, and WordPress and #10.

I can certainly confirm this based on how many calls for help we've gotten lately here at 4Web. We're taking projects with a September start right now -- in this economy!

 

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:

Joomla 1.6 alpha is ready to download.  Please remember it's NOT for production sites!!! And yes, there are a TON of bugs and problems and issues. That's why it's called an alpha.

Like it? Hate it? Have comments on it? Be sure you get involved with the Joomla Project, either on the Bug Squad or helping out in the forums. There's plenty of work to go around for everyone.

Also, remember there is a tech requirement of PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5.0.4+ in order to run Joomla 1.6. Talk to your web host to make sure these are available to you.  If you're running WAMP or XAMPP on your local machine, make sure you're running the most recent version, which will support these requirements.

My Lynda.com blog post is up, all about Joomla 1.6 alpha and what's coming next in the Joomla world.