It seems that the joomla community thinks highly of drupal as well.
While there's some friendly rivalries there, the communities mostly get along pretty good. Joomla is great for people who want to get up and running quickly and easily and want a lot of premade themes to choose from. Drupal is great for people who are willing to dig in and get past the high learning curve and be rewarded with an extremely versatile site that's easy to customize down to very small detail.
how does the templating work. can you use basic html template or do they have to be coded for the cms.
There are a few theme (template) engines for Drupal but, by far, the most popular is phptemplate. This is what comes with Drupal itself and most themes use it. Themes are basically HTML/CSS pages with bits of code in them to show the dynamic parts. For example, to print the main content of the page, you use <?php print $content ?> where you want it to go. There's a lot more to it and you can get very complex if you want to with theme override functions and such. But it all depends on how far you want to go with it.
rumor had it that drupal allows any amount of user levels with just core code, no need to do extensive hacks or bots.
I don't know how Joomla does it but Drupal uses roles. You can add as many as you like. You start with two roles: anonymous and authenticated and then you define whatever you need like admin, moderator, whatever. Each role has its own set of permissions and they are cumulative. So you set all the permissions that authenticated users have and then set the ones that want to add to moderator, asign the person to the moderator role, and they get all the permissions from autheniticated and moderator.
Whew... I'm writing a book here.
Michelle
