Ruby on Rails

Because I have only coded for fun, my little coding experience has been limited to a social networking Rails 3.0 project that I did a couple of years ago.  I love Rails and would like to continue to develop my Rails skills. 

I don't want to start from scratch in this Yelp clone project.  However, Googling "Yelp clone" returns only PHP packages.  See http://goo.gl/0C9L0I .  The most popular is a commercial WordPress theme.  See http://www.geotheme.com/ .  All of its features look very appealing.  It looks like the fastest way to going live.  But I have never done anything in PHP.  Furthermore, I am skeptical of commercial ready-made solutions where I will probably not be able to customize its code to do exactly what I want.  See disadvantages of using commercial packages at https://drupal.org/node/826684  .  For example, I want to have Yelp's " Redo search when map moved " feature .  

WordPress makes things look too easy.  I guess making a good Yelp clone cannot be that easy.  Otherwise, someone else would have done it in that city.  Actually, the city already has a number of business review sites.  But they all suck.  In a way, I am somewhat glad that it is not that easy.  Otherwise, I would not have an opportunity to make a really outstanding Yelp clone with Rails.  But time is of the essence.  Hopefully, I can go live, and build up a good review database and name recognition before Yelp itself jumps into the city.

Do you think Rails would be a good fit for this project as opposed to WordPress?  Is there a free Rails sample project I should use as a starting point for this project to speed up development?

Thank you for your input.