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 J

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.