OStatic

Joomla is an excellent content management system. The package runs well on my own and remotely hosted sites and works will with *nix, PHP, and MySQL.

It is flexible, extensible, and relatively easy to setup and maintain. End-users can add and edit content, which is a real bonus for community, non-profit, and company sites that want to scale up from the traditional webmaster model.

Joomla is great for beginners who want a system up and running in minutes.

It does, however, suffer from some painful restrictions. The core content module, for example, does not support the categorisation of an item in more than one category. Permissions are next to nonexistent - if you're looking for granular permissions and user groups, look elsewhere.

Developers will find these and other restrictions constraining and unpleasant. Joomla 1.0 had (IIRC) 9 API hooks, and while 1.5 has improved the situation somewhat, making Joomla do anything beyond what its development team wanted it to is rough going. Coding standards in the contributed modules are often atrocious.

Getting it to output a pure CSS design is unpleasant, as well, not to mention impossible if you've got a number of popular modules.

My personal advice: give it a miss. You can do everything Joomla can in a more extensible framework like Drupal - without needing to pay for commercial modules, hack core code, or rip your hair out. It'll be worth the initial learning curve for the long-term lowered blood pressure.

Does whatever you need. Community website, blogging, ecommerce, business personal websites.. and the list goes on.... Easy to configure and maintain.

I like to use Joomla for sites because the owner of the site can maintain the site after it is completed. As part of my development service, I teach the new owner or whomever they assign how to update their site via telephone and giving them links to tutorials on the web. currently I am migrating 22 static sites to Joomla for a company in Australia. Joomla is not for everyone, but for those that need to be able to edit their site on any computer in the world with a connection "on the fly", it is perfect. Over the last year, developers have come up with a lot of "web 2.0" effects such as mootools powered modules to take Joomla sites from boring to exciting.