ezPublish vs. Typo3... Opinions?

I’m interested in people’s opinions specifically between Typo3 and ez Publish, as far as usability for complex CMS projects? Lack of documentation has been mentioned in relation to Typo3, but that doesn’t bother me, and neither does “learning curve”. I’m wondering about security and the tightness of code…

I don't think typo3 is much to shake a stick at. I spent three weeks implementing a solution, and kept bumping into typoscript, a powerful proprietary programming language that's at the heart of typo3. It's really very stupid, and shouldn't have been built that way, and makes typo3 unnecesariliy complex to use. It has a lot of great features, but until it embraces open standards... well, it has a ways to go in that department (it would take a total rewrite, or so I've heard...).

It's support for XHTML is hacked, and again, you get to use typoscript to manage everything... Take a look at this:
http://www.mcuniverse.com/RTE_TypoScript.971.0.html

OK, that said, there is hope!

http://www.object-typoscript.org.uk/
There is an OO version of typoscript that actually looks promising.

http://typo3.punkt.de/ts4hs.html
There is also an extension to homesite that helps (though I don't use homesite, I use Zend's tools). Oh, and this doesn't work with the OO framework above.

In short, if you can get through this:
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/doc_core_tsbyex/

...then you'll be able to use typo3... mostly.

If you do decide to implement, try downloading one of these templates:
http://mediatech.net/typo3_templates.html

Typo3 SHOULD have been implemented with XSLT transformation (like eZ Publish). Even the author admits the mistake (sort of):
http://typo3.org/documentation/articles/typoscript-vs-xslt/

Also, I am not religious, and this CMS is laced with religious imagery (pictures of Jesus, prayers in the docs), which is kind of unprofessional, especially if you're going to put it in front of a client.

eZ Publish has the same steepish learning curve, but it is build with open standards. It has a proprietary template language (reference, out of date, here: http://www.ez.no/ez_publish/documentation/incoming/appendices/appendix_e_ez_publish_template_operators), and some of the docs are decidedly out of date.

That said, I've done a few successful implementations for clients, and all of them have been quite pleased with the final results. It also supports web standards (XHTML, XSL), web services (SOAP, XML-RPC), and is OO and extensible.

These two products are like an older model jaguar and a new model Honda. The Jaguar looks great, has all the features, goes fast, but don't open the hood or it will break. And it'll cost you a lot to fix, it's hard to find really good commercial suppport for it, and nobody can figure out the wiring. The Honda just works, and if you trick it out enough, it can be the phattest car out there. But out of the box it's just your average, reliable car. I'm not going anywhere with this, but that really is an ample description of these two.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm part owner in a CMS business (FireBright.com), so I'm biased (we do a lot of work with eZ Publish), but I went through an extensive 6 month evaluation with both of these products last year, and this was my experience. YMMV.

Jonathan