Guidance on building a community site

Hello,

I am trying to build a community website for our families but I need guidance from the drupal community. I am new to drupal so I now enough to enable modules but not really customize themes or css files.

The website that I am trying to mimic is www.ankawa.com which is in arabic so I am trying build our site with arabic support mainly. I do have a website started with drupal rony.netau.net that I am trying to build but need the capable feature to make the site rich.

-I got gallery assist so we can have a gallery profile for each family. Is there a better option to create a gallery?

-For forums, we need to have people upload and view images in comments not sure if this is possible?

-The front page is where I need assistance with. I have views, CCK and panel installed to make the front page look richer where displaying a block of rotating image from the gallery. In the current site, I have an aggregator pulling stories from a website where I am displaying them at the bottom with linked to the story (used aggregator and view and then created a block for each view and added the block to the them region). The frontpage needs to display stories/event that have been added to the forums, displaying the link of the forum article.

Currently using Acquia Marina theme but if there is a better theme that support RTL then I would consider it. I will be very happy to get advise from a great community such as drupal. I know it's a long learning curve, but with your guidance, I think I can do it.

I have the following modules installed and enabled but if you suggest any other modules, then I am all for it.:

Administration Menu
CCK
Fieldgroup (under cck)
Image crop (under cck)
Image FUpload (under cck)
ImageField (under cck)
Node Reference (under cck)
Number (under cck)
Option Widgets (under cck)
Text (under cck)
user Reference (under cck)
Chaos Tools (for panels)
Page manager
view content panes
Aggregator
Color
Comment
Contact
Content Translation
Forum
Locale
Menu
Path
Upload
Profile
Image Cache
ImageAPI
ImageAPI GD2
ImageCache UI
Gallery Assist
Internationalization (I18n)
Comment Upload
IMCE
Skinr
Panels
Panels Nodes
WYSIWYG
IMCE WYSIWYG API bridge (with TinyMCE)
Views
Views Slideshow
Views UI

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE

Rony P.