I've been trying out Joomla on a prototype site. It's called
http://www.tedkubaska.com. It uses Joomla 1.5RC4.
I hosted it on GoDaddy. It costs $6.99 a month. It's basically a streamlined version of the web site at
http://www.ieee-or.org.
I chose to download my own copy of Joomla rather than use the one provided by GoDaddy. I don't know what version of Joomla GoDaddy has, but in December (when I started the site) I suspect it was not as recent as 1.5RC4.
There were some problems getting 1.5RC4 up and running, specifically with the JEvents package. First of all, the JEvents component would just not work with 1.5RC4. There was a name change in the code that was not thoroughly propagated. JEventDispatcher was changed to JDispatcher in most but not all instances. So you have to make that change explicitly.
There are other event packages. I used this one because it was the first one that worked for me; but then, as I said above, it didn't work right way.
The files I downloaded were the following (these are alpha; a beta is available):
com_events1.4.3alpha.zip
mod_events_cal_1.4.3alpha.zip
mod_events_latest_1.4.3alpha.zip
mod_events_legend_1.4.3alpha.zip
bot_events_search1.4.3alpha_joomla1.5.zip
These consist of the component, a calendar module, a latest module, a legend module, and a search bot (Joomla calls bots plugins; the term bot here seems to be left over from Mambo). I'm not using latest and legend; but they work. At first both the calendar and legend modules appeared twice on the page. Fix the duplicate calendar by removing some duplicate lines in mod_events_cal.php. Fix the duplicate legend by deleting (or commenting out if you're nervous) what for me is line 48 in mod_events_legend.php. It's a line that says if your version is >= 1.5 echo the content.
I've also been working with ReMOSistory, but I'll talk about that another time.