The Drupal and Joomla projects are both open source collaborations which release periodic updates to the codebase. You should always keep the code updated to the latest stable version that has been released since they often include security updates in addition to new features or bug fixes. (Keep in mind that you should be tracking and updating both the core code as well as any contributed extensions/modules that you may be using.)

Third post in an on-going series comparing the basics of Drupal and Joomla.

This is the second in our series comparing the basics of Drupal and Joomla. As mentioned, both Drupal and Joomla have active communities that support the projects and produce add-ons which integrate with them for added functionality. In Drupal, these are called "modules" and in Joomla they are called "extensions" (a term which encompasses three sub-types: components, modules and plugins).

As we usually tell our non-profit partners, both Drupal and Joomla have their pluses and minuses. We recommend each of them for particular types of websites and for particular functional and content-related requirements. That said, we thought it might be worthwhile to start a new series on our blog describing some of the parallels between them as well as highlighting in more depth some of the differences.

If you're considering a site revision or complete site redo, you may be interested in this recent report by Idealware, comparing four major CMS systems: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. (We implement sites in Joomla and Drupal at present, depending on the functional requirements of the site at hand).