Hi,
I'd like to give it a try as I'm on the learning curve for PHP as well.
Don't hesitate to ask your questions.
You surely know this already, but Drupal is not PHP, it is a way of using it, based on a concept called "nodes". Other CMS use their own concepts (or not). AFAK, PHP is a great web language because it's good at templating, you can do pretty much anything web-based that you want. It's also good because of the support, the open source, the zillions of courses, books, resources, samples... everywhere. It's got great IDEs and frameworks.
Bye for now,