I spend quite some time a while back evaluating different CMS systems. At first, I really liked Joomla. It is easy to install, and looks good out of the box. But it seems to promise more than it delivers. I found that setting up navigation and menus was a nightmare. That's when I started looking for something else. I consider Joomla to be light-weight, although the same can not be said for its marketing effort!

To me, the real contest is between WordPress and Drupal. They both have their merits, and both are serious systems with serious users.

Still, Joomla (and its predecessor Mambo) were early on the scene and I'm sure they did a lot for the open source community in general, and content management systems in particular. If they have a strong user base, there must be something going for them.