Agreed, I know the 'which framework?' discussion is a slippery and horrible slope, so I'd like to avoid that and focus on getting to point B. It looks like my best bet for ease/flexibility/help is Drupal, but I may see how far I get with Django just for kicks. PHP bothers me because all I hear everywhere is how terrible it is (though it's easy and most people use it). This is one project I'd like to actually see evolve into the reality of its conceptual form, so long term evolution and elegance would be a big plus.
To me Rails is terrible (hold off on the flames), but it's only because I have used php for 10+ years and all the Rails 'experts' seem to want to compare a framework to a language. I haven't played a lot of Rails so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I have played with Django even less, but it may be worth looking into as well as checking out Google App Engine.
My area of expertise is with custom applications and planing those applications. For what you want I feel that you can either use Drupal or a number of different frameworks.
Drupal can be used with a custom module. It will be easy to find a programmer that can create one for you and it would be easy to find someone that can create a custom theme for the site. Since you will be using Drupal, you would have access to all the features of it. You may run into issues when you start working on your mobile app.
Frameworks (symfony, Django, Rails, etc) will give you more flexibility when it comes to more custom options such as your rating system and more detailed user profiles. Most of my experience is with symfony and I am going to assume that other frameworks have some of the same functionality. Frameworks might be a better fit since you want to incorporate a mobile app.
The reason I would not use Wordpress is because for all you want to make, it is just not a good fit. Wordpress is mainly used for blogs (see one of the above comments) but what you want to make is a lot more then just a blog with some pretty pictures. There will be some type of interactivity on the site such as rating images.
I hope this makes more sense then my original comment =)
Comments
Agreed, I know the 'which framework?' discussion is a slippery and horrible slope, so I'd like to avoid that and focus on getting to point B. It looks like my best bet for ease/flexibility/help is Drupal, but I may see how far I get with Django just for kicks. PHP bothers me because all I hear everywhere is how terrible it is (though it's easy and most people use it). This is one project I'd like to actually see evolve into the reality of its conceptual form, so long term evolution and elegance would be a big plus.
To me Rails is terrible (hold off on the flames), but it's only because I have used php for 10+ years and all the Rails 'experts' seem to want to compare a framework to a language. I haven't played a lot of Rails so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I have played with Django even less, but it may be worth looking into as well as checking out Google App Engine.
My area of expertise is with custom applications and planing those applications. For what you want I feel that you can either use Drupal or a number of different frameworks.
Drupal can be used with a custom module. It will be easy to find a programmer that can create one for you and it would be easy to find someone that can create a custom theme for the site. Since you will be using Drupal, you would have access to all the features of it. You may run into issues when you start working on your mobile app.
Frameworks (symfony, Django, Rails, etc) will give you more flexibility when it comes to more custom options such as your rating system and more detailed user profiles. Most of my experience is with symfony and I am going to assume that other frameworks have some of the same functionality. Frameworks might be a better fit since you want to incorporate a mobile app.
The reason I would not use Wordpress is because for all you want to make, it is just not a good fit. Wordpress is mainly used for blogs (see one of the above comments) but what you want to make is a lot more then just a blog with some pretty pictures. There will be some type of interactivity on the site such as rating images.
I hope this makes more sense then my original comment =)