Drupal is about 1000x more extendable than joomla.

I used to solely develop sites in joomla, moved to drupal, and will be moving to RoR.

The freedom drupal allows is like night and day over joomla.

Though I agree with the statement above, it also depends on how much customization you will need to do, or what sort of modules you will need to add.

The Drupal architecture may be a bit of overkill for what you are looking to do. I've done a very little bit of work on both, and Joomla is easier to understand, and therefore simpler to work with for smaller customized code pieces.

So, if Joomla meets your requirements with it's core install (or with only a few add ons), I'd go Joomla. If you need more extensibility, then go Drupal.

Both systems have gone through a transition from an amateur cms/portal system, which has matured over time. Drupal has come a lot further in this process that Joomla has, which means that today it's closer to be a general purpose framework. It still holds some of its heritage, so you'll probably find it somewhere in between Joomla and RoR. That's not a bad thing, if what you're building is some kind of cms.

Compared to other general purpose frameworks, Drupal has a lot of stuff out-of-the-box, and it's quite easy to get in to. The community has been gaining a lot of followers recently and in some areas it is becoming the cms of choice for larger businesses. It's especially popular in the news paper world.

Judging from my observations, I would say that Drupal is a much more mature system that Joomla is (although I must admit I have limited experience with Joomla). I think they are about equal in how easy they are to learn. Both of them are fairly low-tech, procedural systems. I would pick Drupal of the two.

If you'd find it helpful to read up on what features Drupal offers, so you can compare with what you know about Joomla, I just wrote an article on this last night: http://returncontrol.com/what-does-drupal-provide-out-of-the...

In the article, I actually address the same point you make about Drupal being a "framework" (or "platform") rather than a CMS. In summary, it's probably best to think of Drupal as a "Web construction kit" rather than a CMS because its modular architecture allows you to plug in all sorts of features that go well beyond typical content management.

I actively develop for Drupal (boost module). This 10 min demo should give you an idea on how fast sites can go up with it: http://acquia.com/what-is-drupal. I recommend Drupal.

my partner set up Joomla for the Seminar Paper we wrote last year. don't know why he did that since later in the project we had to code, but after using it for a day or two I immediately asked him to set up Trac. it just was a pain viewed from the usability point. so, my advice is to stay away from Joomla if it's an option. I can't say if Drupal is better or not since I've never worked with it, but what I can say is that it can't get worse than Joomla! conclusion: use Drupal.