| Joomla has two main branches, the 1.0.x and 1.5.x; the first one is legacy branch that has a lot of addons, themes, etc.; the new 1.5.x has fewer choices.
Joomla is easy to use for non-developer. However, it is rather limited platform compared to competitors (WP and Drupal), and its codebase is programmed in a bad way (just take a look at some sources). It consumes more processing resources to serve a page and has limited caching capabilities. This is not a problem if you get only few hundred unique visitors a day, so most sites are OK with Joomla. Bigger sites either switch to different platforms, implement some external caching, or buy powerful dedicated servers.
You can find plenty of useful information and advice on forum.joomla.org
Good luck! |