There’s an article about the usability of Joomla Vs Wordpress. There’s a pretty good comment stream on slashdot.

Postmodern Sideshow and MayorAwesome.com both recently switched from Joomla to Wordpress (although Mayor Awesome went through drupal first).

I personally haven’t looked back since switching. All of the design metaphors in Joomla don’t make sense. If you follow the slashdot threads, you’ll see an echo chamber: Joomla is powerful, but it has a steep learning curve, and is complicated by too many designers going off in different user interface directions. Let me put it to you this way. I trashed my joomla installation so I could upgrade to Joomla 1.5. I spent several weeks trying in vain to get everything back in order.

I installed wordpress in five minutes while I was trashed. It took me all of three days (after work) to get the css and styles back to the way I like it. The user interface is cleaner, and there are a multitude of programs that allow you to edit articles from cellphones or from the desktop.

Joomla is allright if you hobby is tinkering around with website software. But if your hobby is communicating with the world, I wouldn’t waste your time.