New to CMS, not sure what to expect of WordPress

I know, I know– another, “Will wordpress work for me?” thread. But I am completely new to the idea of a CMS system, and it’s hard shopping around for a good one when I’m not really sure what all of them can do.

So here’s what I need:

1) I need a CMS that enables my supervisor, as well as any current and future members of the organization I work for, to add news, press releases, etc without having to touch the code.

2) As the organization expands, there may be more pages that the administrative team (We’re the ones who deal with the website) may need to include. I need a simple way for this to happen assuming that those involved don’t know a lick of code.

3) We are considering a couple of different features such as the ability to join our organization online, (which would involve writing information to a database, and online payment) complete applications for various events, and a searchable database of local artists. I am not a back-end developer by any stretch of the imagination, so the ideal solution for this problem would be a CMS that offers plugins for that sort of thing. Or, failing that, one that would support 3rd party code enabling that capability.

4)A CMS that supports dropdowns. I tried plugging the current template I have mocked up for my boss into WordPress, and the java dropdown stopped working immediately. I’m not sure what to do about that, since I have no knowledge of Java, and very little knowledge of PHP.

Now I know that WordPress can accomplish #1 and probably #2, so 3 & 4 are more pressing questions for me. To be honest, I need a CMS that doesn’t require too much work from me, either, only because– as I said before– I don’t have much knowledge of PHP, and even reading through the Codex trying to find the answers to my questions has left me quite overwhelmed. I certainly plan to learn PHP one day, just not all at once. 🙂

If you’re still reading this big ol’ thing, and you think WordPress is the CMS for me, please give me a clue as to what wordpress features would help me accomplish my goals. If you’re curious about the site I’m trying to transfer over to WordPress, have a gander here.

And for my horribly butchered attempt at wordpressing it, see here You can tell I have no idea what I’m doing.

Thanks in advance!