Don't know how many you will find for free that are worth much, but some know-how is going to be required to get it up and running. Also finding one that does exactly what you need it going to be difficult. Best is to have a custom one built or write it yourself, both of which seem outside your ability ATM.

One word of advice, be very wary of where you get your images. If you plan on just collecting them off the Internet sooner or later someone's going to find you out, image theft is taken very seriously by many site owners.

Not sure what type of script you will need for your project / hobby,
but because of rocknbil's advice on CMS, try searching in an engine by typing in this info exactly as shown:

(script + free + content management)

It will pull up some CMS scripts.

Hope this helps:)

Good luck Amanda:)

frenzy77

Drupal
Geeklog
Joomla
Mambo Open Source
PHP-Nuke
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
TYPO3
Xoops

I'll try them all and see if I like them

Mambo has been rolled in Joomla, so you might want to forgo installing Mambo, you'll end up upgrading it to Joomla anyway.

It sounds as if you are going to install each of those packages. Here's a tip - Install them in their own directories. Many of them will at least share a common index file, so if they all get installed in the root dir then only the last one will work for you -- maybe.

It is not easy to tell you which one will work best for you, for many reasons from personal taste to technical abilities. There is also going to be a learning curve for each of those packages. I've used Joomla on a couple of sites and I'm still learning. For ease of use and support I would recommend Joomla. That's based on my personal preference, which may vary from yours.

Using any of these packages will almost certainly require you to make modification to the style sheets and possibly to the actual source code. I started making modifications to the actual source (non-css pages) before I was able to learn how to control the presentation from the administrator panel. Can you say DOH! This is not recommended since I've managed to lose some of the functionality. With a little experience under my belt I can restore the code and use the admin panel as was intended.

Your best bet, pick one and work with it. If you don't like it, uninstall and try another. It sounds like you might have wanted your site up and running yesterday - you may be disillusioned if that's the case. This will take some time no matter which package you choose.

Best of luck.

<PS - Since I've made the recommendation for Joomla, go ahead and check out their support forum. (forum dot joomla dot org) You will find that many of the questions about that package and its various implementations have already been asked, and answered. >