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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.

First off, what is a Joomla admin template? You certainly know that in the front end of Joomla, you can download and install a bajillion different templates, or you can code your own. This is one of Joomla's most fabulous qualities and the one I love best. You can make that template do anything you want. You can make the perfect design for your client. Joomla doesn't have to look like Joomla all the time, unless you want it to.

Now, that same fabulous templating quality was carried to the back end of Joomla. Rather than have one single, fixed interface that everyone is forced to use, you can install any kind of Joomla administrator template you wish. You can write your own as well.

I'm not talking about pulling out the Joomla icon in the upper left corner and replacing it with your icon, or changing a few colors, or even uploading alternative icons. I'm talking a full-blown recoding of the Joomla admin template. Joomla doesn't look like Joomla anymore.

And therein lies the big problem.

Do you think of Joomla as software? You should. It's an application, same as Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop or any of the dozens of other tools you use every day.

Software has a very specific interface. You expect it to look and act a certain way, or you feel quite lost.

Think about what happened when Microsoft upgraded Office from 2003 to 2007. How long did it take you to find the print button? How many swear words came out of your mouth? Or perhaps, like me, you decided there was no $%^&* way you were going through that particular hell, and you refused to upgrade? (I've been told they're rearranging the interface again for Office 2010.)

So let's consider the positives of changing the Joomla admin template to something totally different for a given website.

• The fact that you can do this at all is really, really cool.
• You could get the perfect admin template for you. Everything is exactly where you want it.
• If you're a very controlling web development shop, you could pull out all semblances of Joomla and call this your own product entirely, without ever mentioning the word Joomla. (Or perhaps this violates Joomla rules? But then, how would they find out?)

Notice not one of those items is user-centered at all. They are all about you, what you want, what works for your shop.

Now let's consider some downsides of changing the Joomla administrator template.

• If you want to learn Joomla from a book, training videos, other blog posts, etc, you need to figure out which Joomla admin template is being used and configure your site accordingly. Remember that if this is your client, they will know only the admin template you install for them. This means they can't go buy books or watch videos, because they don't know how to change the admin template. (Changing the admin template is generally not covered in books and videos.)
• When a new client calls you and asks a question about their site, you have to ask what kind of interface they're looking at. Hopefully you are familiar with that admin template so you can help them.
• When you take over a Joomla website from a previous developer, you might want to change the admin template from what they were using to what you like. That means you have to retrain the client in how to work with the site, or you have to learn a whole new interface.

Notice all of those items have to do with training and learning Joomla. One of Joomla's big assets is that it's not terribly difficult to learn. The general consensus seems to be that Wordpress is easiest, and Drupal is most difficult, but Joomla is a great combination of powerful and easy to use. My clients certainly seem to do fine updating their sites, once I've trained them. Why do we want to ruin that with changing an interface?

Think very, very carefully about what you're doing before you modify the Joomla admin template. There are a lot of downsides to doing this. Doing it just because you can is NOT a good idea. You need a very clear, compelling reason to alter a software interface. Use your powers for good!