Please help a newbie out

I’m coming over from blogger and feeling really overwhelmed by what I want to accomplish – and learning the coding to do it.

Eventually I want people to register at my site. Once registered, they will be able to create posts. These posts should be custom post types and I’d like the users to fill out a form with all the necessary content and then every post will look the same using the data they submitted. I need all kinds of fields – dates, url, photos, etc. Kind of like a music database site where the users can add data. Then, all these “posts” will need to be searchable by categories, date fields and a few others.

I’ve looked at using pods cms, and tutorials for creating my own custom post types but I’m just so confused. Plus these plugins I’ve looked at all seem to use the dashboard, and not the frontend like I was hoping.

Would someone be kind enough to point me in the right direction please?

Thank you!!