cursed_phil

Hello there, I'm new in these forums because I need advice for a new web project I'm working on. I know this might sound insane, but what I want to do is developing an online community with user submitted how to's, message boards, member profiles, private messaging, and a lot more features. I don't want to get too much into detail about functions of the service, but I'm pretty sure there is no CMS out there that might fit my needs, because I want to be able to extend the features over time and want it to be fully customizable. Now as I said before, I know it might sound insane to build something like this from scratch, but on the other hand, it definitely can be done. I'd say I'm really good in HTML/CSS, I'm decent in JavaScript, I get alot done with PHP and so far I've used WordPress for most of my web projects, and I always got it to 100% fit my needs. In this case, I just think it's easier to develop both frontend and backend from scratch. So what I'm looking for is advice on where to start, how to dig deeper into the right technologies, whether or not I should rely on a specific framework, how to not just get the site working but also be secure (we're dealing with private information, right?), and so on. Any help is more than appreciated! Cheers!