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Your in for a long haul buddy. While you should learn PHP and MySQL (or even ASP.NET or JavaBeans, etc). You should also consider how long you want to wait to get this community up and running. Learning how to hack together a system in PHP that will accomplish all your goals could take only a couple of months however, learning how to do it right will take much longer.
You see, when designing any application there are several factors to consider aside from desired functionality. The most important of which (at least in my opinion) is your codes shelf life, how long will it work for your situation? You also must be careful not to code yourself into a corner by creating non-extensible code or intermixing your models, views and controllers (this is a common problem by new developers and one in which usually results in rewriting code several times throughout the lifetime of a project).
Now with that said (and by all means, do learn it all) there are third party solutions that are more than perfect for your project and encompass most everything you need at a cost that would be less than if you paid yourself $5 an hour to code it. Infact, your using a perfect solution right now, it's called vBulletin.
Also, don't let anyone try to tell you that it's less acceptable to use a third party solution, after all, time is money (your time is worth something isn't it?) and I'm pretty sure your not just creating your website for fun but would like to monetize it as well. My suggestion would be to do some dollar cost averaging, estimating how long it might take you to do the project and at what personal cost (how much would you work for) to determine which route is most acceptable to you.
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