does anyone here use these open-source application in a web-development context? what are your thoughts and experiences? please share.

Wordpress is the best for blogs. Even CNN and some other leading media conglomerates around the world, use Wordpress to power their blogs.

wordpress is the best for blogs, I second Niyie on this,
Drupal is the most scalable ( if scalability and customisation is what you desire )
Joomla is easy to setup and maintain but not easy to customise and scale up.

So depending on your expertise and needs each and everyone has its pros and cons

I think Joomla is too elimentary for serious web projects. Drupal however is nice although it requires some extra technical knowledge. But i think i will still pick Drupal out of the three. u can check these sites i did with drupal and tell me what u think
www.aflonacademy.org
www.telnigeria.org

I think you are right about drupal,
I prefer drupal to all of them, I used it on this pet project www.theinvestor.in , just to get hands on experience.
I advice technical savy guys to go for drupal

Hey i like this discussion and i have been studying these CMS from my work place for a while and i realized that i had once made that same judgement that Drupal is better of than Joomla, only to realize that the reverse is the case.
A little history on Joomla. Joomla as a CMS was an offshoot of Mambo, A CMS that was first developed by an Australian company called Miro back in 2005. When the CMS gained popularity the company decided to have a commercialize version of it as well as an open source version of it, a BIG MISTAKE BY THEM !, anyway , they were to do the official announcement in September 2006.
Problem started when the announcement was over and the team of developers who had worked on the project right from the onset were sadly left out. YES!!! it sounds too good to be true, but it happened. The team of developers were baffled but did not said anything until the next day. They decided to opt for the open source version and to cut the long story short, the did an overhaul of the entire application and a couple things followed which you can find in their site, and finally Joomla was born. and today it is one of the most used open source CMS.
It has gone through a lot of changes over the years , right now they are at the 1.5 version of it while Mambo is still lagging behind. Joomla is a powerful CMS with a lot of capabilities, it is extensible meaning you can build your own application on top of its framework. To do that you would have to understand terms like Component,Modules, Extensions,Plug-ins etc. You can customize it because the developers has abstracted a lot of things in it to allow for customization.
Even Google had arranged student PHP programmers in there Google Summer of Code to come up with a very good extension for the Joomla CMS, six of this extension are proposed and five of this proposals have been completed.You can check the php official site to find out what the extensions are. JUST A GOSSIP!! Google guys a paying each of this student $4,500 cash for their work.
To me i think it is the best CMS system, if you are interested in knowing more about it and how you can build on its framework, i have a very good book that is written about the CMS. To get it you have to pay me , let me see, N5000 raise to power zero minus one .


Just email me at chris4ama@excite.com

ok cdeveloper
nice write up but I have practical proofs to show that drupal is better in terms of flexibility and what you can do with the CMS. To build news sites like this one I themed www.edennewspaper.com with joomla is very easy and with drupal its almost same thing but more difficult to setup.
but this is a full blown social networking site like myspace, www.adrenalinehub.com it was built entirely with drupal and drupal plugins , if you try that with Joomla you wont get upto half of that functionality. for more information about adrenalinehub solution follow the drupal page http://drupal.org/node/98134

Most developers like myself like solutions that are highly flexible and Joomla is too rigid in terms of what you can do with it. But Drupal comes with more flexibility but a steep learning curve.

Joomla is not really rigid like you said it has space for expansion , meaning you can adding in you own code and have you functionality built in to it. Joomla 1.5 has provided developers like us the opportunity to create our own separate code and add it in to Joomla as a component , the process is really not difficult, just a couple of classes, that comply with the Joomla architecture and that is all you have to do.

I used Wordpress but the problem i'm facinq is how to insert HTML/Javascrpit? but that of Drupa & Joomla i don't recommend it, Wordpress is Kool.

Joomla is perfect and more user friendly.
My host company siteground.com recommended Joomla for me
Despite the fact that they also have Drupal on their list.
Drupal is good but i can also link you up with about five forums
where this kind of debate goes on too.
And guess what, Joomla carries more vote in all of them.
Wordpress is ok too but its not in the same league with Drupal and Joomla.
I use Wordpress on my new blog CHECK MY BLOGS.
But i am developing my big website with Joomla.

Sam Milla is now a Webmaster, Congrat.