Hey Thanks!
I'm really pleased with how it's come along so far, and particularly the ease with which I've been able to add new users, and allow guest bloggers. And it's all your fault 
Now to the geeky stuff.
I've been playing with Drupal, Joomla, Scoop, and Wordpress for the past month both for personal reasons, and because the Baltimore County Young Dems want to put up a blog, and as communications director, it's kind of my job.
Now, I have the feeling that Wordpress would be the easier/better tool if I knew a lick of code. But I don't. I know a little softcode for mushing, and just enough html to code my way out of a paper bag, but that's it. And frankly, I don't want to learn. I'm too busy.
So, speaking as somewhat of a technophobe, here's what I've learned.
Wordpress is easy to set up and use with just the basics pretty much right out of the box. However, extending it with plug-ins has been a total nightmare for me. Either they don't work, or require you to actually edit PHP files. I have struggled for three weeks now to set up a decent RSS news aggregator on my wordpress site, and have yet to be successful. It seems very flexible if you know what you're doing and you're willing to edit the files. But I'm not.
Joomla was a snap to install with a fantastico script, and looked to be extremely powerful. It also looked as if it didn't require you to know any html or php or anything else. If I could figure out how to use it, it would be my first choice. It seems far better managed than Drupal. The problem was, the page loads with all this joomla logo junk all over it. After six hours, I still could not figure out how to replace all the junk they put on the site. I'm sure there's an easy way that I was just missing, but there you have it.
Scoop is, I'm told, fairly unmaintained, and has a smaller development community than others. Because of that, I steered away. And when I installed it, it wasn't pretty.
Drupal was also easily installed with a fantastico script, and functional straight away. And I was pleased I was able to find a theme that went with the 'jousting' idea, all colorful and exciting. But that aside, know that Drupal themes are limited and for the most part quite ugly. Moreover, while Drupal has some really extraordinary plug-in modules, most of which I was able to install without any technical knowledge, they don't all play nicely together. I've had to uninstall some modules because they broke the site. And I still can't figure out why it's so hard for users to sign-out from jousting for justice.
I put in a bug report over at Drupal, but it remains to be seen whether or not they will laugh at me.
Commenting by HaloScan
