As a company specialized in developing custom CMS, we have been asked to deploy a open source CMS in our next project.
We are free to choose a system. What would you recommend for a team familiar with MVC model and OOP in PHP5?
I was told that Drupal and TYPO3 are very hard at the beginning, so what are the other options? eZ Publish or Joomla maybe?
No.. not ezPublish.. A hell to learn. Too much strange configuration going on there.
If you're looking for an enterprise-class CMS I would not even mention joomla. I see that you're not aware of Silverstripe. I recommend to check it out!
If the people on your team are familiar with PHP then Drupal should not be difficult at all for them. There are a few conventions that Drupal follows for creating hooks which are unique to it but are implemented consistently in core so once they are learned your team will be able to write module code that can control pretty much any aspect of how the site works.
The main reason for Drupal's reputation of being hard to learn is the large number of options in the administration screen, but if someone is serious about creating and maintaining a proper site this shouldn't be enough to turn them off of Drupal.
CMSMadeSimple by far has the nicest codebase ive stumbled myself. Ive also made one commercial site with Joomla. It has lots of documentation but personally ive found it to be quite poor.
I don't really understand y ur looking for the hardest, but anyway
not particular for multipurpose, content rich websites, but i'll throw magento into the hard-list for ecommerce solutions (though u could build you entire enterprise site around it). Their anual support at £4k - £6K should knock ur pants off!