Noob may prefer Joomla! 1.0.12 or Drupal?

Joomla (even in v1.5) only allows a very limited number of account types, so I suspect it won't meet your needs. I agree that Drupal is harder to use at first, but I think you'd find it more suitable.

Welcome to Drupal.org!

Have you asked the same question in joomla forums? ;-)

I once was a joomla user and now I'm with Drupal for the last two years and i'm very glad about my decision, being very satisfied with Drupal and it's community which is very helpful.

Okay, here we go:

Although Joomla is a nice CMS too I prefer Drupal and I would recommend it to you too.
You don't need to have PHP skills to install and set up a nice site with Drupal5.
The installing is very simple: Just upload the pack and set up a DB, then open the install page and fill in all required informations - that's all.

Different types of accounts are absolutely no problem with drupal, that's something Drupal allways provided and is very simple and understandable.
Private Forums are no problem too, but you may find the forum look a bit too simple if you are used to phpBB or vB. You can do a lot with theming then and there are even more possibilities. You may use vB for Drupal or other third party modules if you like so.
Collaborative documents are called "books" in Drupal and are in core.
Uploading photos is no problem with Drupal too.

So how about installing a quick test installation and compare joomla to Drupal on your server? It will be set up quickly and you will see which CMS is more intuitive to you.

Another tipp: Browse the "modules" directory here at Drupal to see which features you can ad via modules.
Once you like a module have a look at "pending issues" of the project to see if the module is well supported or if it has a lot of bugs.
Do the same at joomla.

Have Phun!

From what little I've seen of Joomla, Drupal is better in every respect! On a project I've been working on recently a Joomla site was set up, but the developers seemed to have trouble getting the theme to come out exactly as desired, clean URLs weren't in fashion, various other things were problematic ... possibly the developers of the Joomla site were only just getting to grips with Joomla, or were overworked etc. etc.!!

To be honest, the best way of finding out which CMS is right for you is to try them both out. You will learn a lot more than from reading my biased comments and in the end will be able to make a really good decision.

Good luck,
gpk
----
www.gelst.com

you can test both CMS's without installing if you want by playing with the demo installations here: http://opensourcecms.com/ this allows you to test the admin areas of both as well.

oops ... posted in error ...

I tried Wordpress for a year and it's great for simple usage. Then I tried Joomla for two days but I didn't like the output. With Drupal 5.1 the story is basically: simple to installl, awesome functionality and flexibility out of the box. The learning curve is steep but once you know what you want it is pretty easy to accomplish it. Like someone said: it is free software, but you pay in another way, by learning to use it.
I advise to keep the number of Modules low, though, as they might become unusable with upgrades. CCK and Views are pretty essential, imho. But there you have it: CCK requires a Views that is still in beta5 stage. Works fine with me, though...

One thing that strikes me as odd: backups are pretty essential when it comes to database and server based sites. Still, backup is not in the core and the Backup module has been in the dev stage for ages. That is not a good practice for end users that are not programmers.

Hans
www.johnmartyn.info

There are many schools using Drupal - you will not be alone. There is a specific module for schools, so you may have a lot of your work already done.

Nancy W.
Drupal Cookbook (for New Drupallers)
Adding Hidden Design or How To notes in your database