Hi uomonet,
My son plays in a football team and they want their own website. My first website was entirely in HTML. But I was the single point of failure because I had to place all the content on the site by myself.
So I looked for a cms that was easy enough to understand for me as well as for those who have to put content on the site.
I first tried Xoops. Easy to install but it took me some time to make it look nice.
Then I tried Plone (on top of Zope) under SME6. I think Plone is a much better cms than Joomla! because it has a sofisticated authorisation structure combined with real workflow. It is written in Python and is a layer on top of Zope with its own webserver, objectdatabase and so on. Because of this structure it is much slower and for a newbie much more difficult to understand and to modify.
Than I tried Mambo. Very easy to install, al lot of add-ons available and very easy to use. It has no real workflow capabilities and the authorisation structure is very flat. But that is no problem in my case.
I tried to install Typo3, but untill now I didn't succeed.
Joomla is based on Mambo and has the same structure for now. Joomla 1.5 will be quite different.
There are also very good templates available for Joomla (see
http://www.rockettheme.com/). I use the 'Versatility II' template (see
http://fczcsel.mlkok.nl)
I know very little about PHP, but when you install Joomla it needs some directories to be writable. It also checks for the 'PHP session save path" to be writable. PHP needs a place to store its session data in. It is normally not writable.
To install Joomla! you don't need a contrib. Just download the Italian version of Joomla or download the international version with the Italian language pack.