If you have web programming expertise, I need your guidance...

I didn't post this in "hire a freelancer" as right now I would like to take this project on by myself. Right now I am just looking for some guidance on how to go about programming this thing.

I'm creating a site much like Pinterest in the sense that there are users, and the users can post and have pages to post to and others can comment on the posts. There's more to it, but that's the gist of it.

I'm pretty sure pinterest uses django. I started out coding this thing in php/mysql, but I'm second guessing my implementation when I started dealing with member info (security). Instead of storing it all in a database, I am now thinking of just using facebook or twitter login so that they can handle the "security" aspect of the site to some degree. Though I want users that may not have a facebook or twitter to be able to create an account.

Any suggestions on how to go about making the site? Would django make more sense or another web framework? What's the best way to deal with facebook integration / not having to deal with security of storing users information? I'm looking at this as a project for me to start coding and get a grasp on some intermediate concepts.

Things to take into account: I want to have an iphone and android app for the site and that may factor into this as well.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

If you are cool with server-side JavaScript, take a look at Meteor.js. They have an accounts package, similar to an NPM package, which makes integrating with Facebook or Twitter authentication extremely simple. There are also some fairly straight forward methods of converting a Meteor.js or Node.js application into a native iOS or Android app using PhoneGap.

Not sure what would be the best option for this, but I wouldn't go by implementing everything by yourself from scratch with php/mysql but instead compare different PHP frameworks. Most of the popular once does they job and choosing between them is often bit matter of taste and people are often recommending something against other just based on their own taste not based on technical or security aspects. The benefits of using frameworks comes from security aspects, not only from user management, but also against hacking like sql injection, xss... and in addition there are many ready made functionalities coming out of box so you don't need to always reinvent the wheel. Personally I use CodeIginiter anything else than basic websites.

Django is a good choice but it's gonna take quite some time to learn it unless you are already experienced with Python. Also, take into account the fact that it's harder to deplay Django websites compared to other frameworks. If you choose Django, I recommend webfaction.com for hosting. They make deplayment really easy and have awesome customer service (I am not affiliated with them).

For facebook/twitter login you can use a module called python-social-auth (look it up on github). It's really easy to use. You can implement the log in system in ~10 minutes if you know what you are doing but the official documentation sucks so the first time you'll use it it's gonna take some time to set it up.

Anyway, you project, although it might look easy, requires quite some knowledge about website development so I would recommend getting someone to do it for you.
If that' s not an option (money issues perhaps) then try to develop it in wordpress of something likes that and look for some plugins to handle picture upload from users and stuff likes that.