> Frankly I don’t even know where to start. I’m most proficient in PHP, but I can pick up anything really. I breezed through the codecademy.com Ruby and Python tutorials in an afternoon but I’ve never done anything in Ruby or Python.

If you're experienced as you say you are, then you shouldn't be learning new languages via tutorials...but rather through things like O'Reilly's "Cookbook" series. That should get you up to speed much faster.