It really depends on what you want to do. I looked hard into Joomla for a recent project and then finally decided on Drupal because it appears to be better at some features that my client needed.

However, for most small projects, I've found that the easiest thing is to hack up WordPress. You'd be amazed what you can make it do! And the PHP is really straightforward and easy to edit (not to mention that it has a built in theme editor inside the admin interface that is really nice when you need to make a change from somebody else's computer).