[papa]

Re: language choice, pick the one you're most comfortable working with (if you don't know, just start playing around with each). Cake, Rails and Django are all web frameworks for PHP, Ruby and Python respectively and may be appropriate for what you need.

As for the project, you've already done some of the right first steps with the feature list and paper mockups. Building it comes next.

Pick a couple of features to build out and maybe select a single university/town to focus on initially and build out functionality and content for that first.