Dear Joomla,

We’re all so proud of you and how far you’ve come these five years. Your 20 parents conceived of you because they wanted to have fun. Ever since, people have come to you looking for a good time, to make friends all over the world, to contribute to the greater good.

In dog years, or technology years, you’re actually 35. This is actually a better age to describe you. You’re old enough to have been around the block, and old enough to know better. But you’re still plenty young enough to have passion, vision, ambition, and live on the cutting edge. And, of course, you still know how to party.

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 just got back from a great week at Lynda.com, recording two more titles, hopefully out soon.

The first title is "CMS Website Strategy and Planning", and it covers all of the things you should think about and talk about with your client before building your website.

The second title is "Preparing CMS Web Graphics Using Open Source Tools". It covers how to think about a good design for a CMS as well as create an HTML page using GIMP for graphics and KompoZer for writing the HTML and CSS.

Everywhere you look, usability problems exist everywhere.

Sometimes those usability problems are a direct result of branding.

Let's take this example. Health insurance! Now, there's plenty of usability problems in the health insurance industry, but I want to focus on one tiny little problem, a direct result of branding conflicting with usability.

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:

Sections, categories, articles, menu items. See how it's a SCAM? Remember you do need to create them in this order, as menu items for articles can't exist without the article, the article can't exist without section/category, the category can't exist without section.

Then there's this thing called "uncategorized" associated with an article. So you CAN have an article that exists without section and category! Well, sort of. Think of "uncategorized" as the default section and "uncategorized" as the default category.

So, Frequently Asked Questions about the SCAM:

1. Can an article be assigned more than one section/category?
Nope. One section/category per article.

I am not a graphic designer. I can't draw stick figures well, and I always wear jeans, khakis, or black pants because I've been told they match everything.

But I've worked with enough graphic designers through the years to know that there are rules to working in a given medium, and there are limitations to that medium as well. For example, if you're making a rack card, those are a certain fixed dimension. You may want to make a bigger design, but you have to work within the limitations of the medium - in this case, the paper, which must fit in the spot on a rack. Perhaps your client only has enough money to afford 2 colors, or 4 colors on one side and black and white on the other. Again, a medium limitation. Yet you never hear print designers complaining about these limitations. They're part of the job; they go with the territory.

I also assume, as a code geek, that I don't know a darn thing about working in print. I hear terms like "4 color" or "bleed" tossed around, and I eventually figure out what they mean. I own a copy of InDesign, and I know where the text tool is. These things absolutely do not make me a print design expert. If I need something printed, I always hire someone who knows what they're doing, like Meg McCarthy.

Got an email this morning announcing the new Digital Image Editor that runs inside of Joomla.   Very cool!!!  I have only tried the demo on the site, but it looks great.

It's a very basic editor that does simple things like crop, rotate, resize, flip, and apply a few filters. There's a history option so a client can go backwards if they make a mistake. That's really all a client needs to get images on their site. It's definitely not Photoshop -- but it doesn't NEED to be. This is intended for people who want to post a photo directly from the digital camera, then edit the image within Joomla, making Joomla one-stop shopping for posting content and images.

Drawback: it does save the original image and you save the edited version as another file. Downside to this is that your disk space could fill up very quickly with original pictures, particularly if they're straight off a many megapixel digital camera.

Article is here.

Leave politics aside for the moment, and just consider the beauty of this application.

The problem: You need to get millions of people to vote for you in an election. 

For our fans, we haven't been posting much because... well, we've been awfully busy. We are thrilled with our first 9 months in business. We established a new company, just as the economy was tanking and gas and oil prices were going sky-high. Yet we've had plenty of leads, and plenty of work to keep us very busy.

Watch this blog over the next 3 months. We anticipate launching 4 large, substantial sites by the end of the year, all with various custom-coded components and modules, and of course all with custom templates.  We also have several smaller sites on the way.

Why are we so busy in this frightening economy?