Community Board, how to start?

Hello everybody,

as I’m an absolute beginner in WP and other OpenSource Tools like Drupal for building community-sites, I hope someone will be so kind to give me little information about.

I want to create a community-portal where members can create and manage their own accounts. The account information (all or selected) should be visible for other members (all/selected).

For example let’s assume the community consists of chiefs who want to share their recipes. I want to have a big community (all chiefs) which consists of small communities (all chiefs of one town) and then still smaller communities (italian restaurants, french, fish, …).

So the member has to login. Then he can post a recipe in a main-category (dinner, lunch, sweets, …) and sub-categories (friends, buisness, 10min., 20min., costs, meat, vegetarian, …).

The author of his recipe must have full access to his entry to correct or to delete it if necessary.

Other members should be able to leave comments and if they want it should be possible to talk in a forum about the recipes.

Further, and this is a very important feature, the members should have the chance to vote (giving notes from 1 to 6 or something else). I want to make contests once a month, where authors can sign in for, leave their recipes, and all members or just a few selected ones can vote.

So you see, it is necessary to have many variables.

If anybody could give me some advice how to start up, what tools I should use or where I can get more information about this topic, I would be very gladful.

It’s a long time ago, but there was a time I was able to write progs in TurboPascal, I have basic skills in HTML, CSS and a little bit in PHP. But I don’t want to start learning complete new languages. There should be scripts, plugins, themes, etc. I can adapt without investing hundrets of hours…

So what I’m searching for is a tool or a tool-set which is prebuilt for such a project. Any tips are welcome…

Many thanks in advance
Flavius (hka genius_in_spe)