What is the best path to create a review based website (similar to Yelp)?

I would recommend [HTML,CSS] and Ruby on rails because you are making an interactive website and you will need to design it with colors and others

Or php with its built in access to MySQL is also a good choice. I believe there teaching on both of those in treehouse.

I second both recommendations above. They can both work. If you have any programming experience using something like c++ or java in school but no web development experience, I would recommend the Ruby on Rails route. If you don't have experience programming at all and your goal is to just get that first site built as soon as possible, I would recommend going the php route. Ruby on Rails has a lot going on and, unless there is some tutorial out there that builds a very similar site to the one you want to build, it may take a long time to learn to do it well with Ruby on Rails.

To be honest, I have yet to hear of a single individual learning Rails from scratch in 6-12 months. 3 years is probably more realistic for a motivated student with no previous programming or web design experience.