How display specific category post to specific users?

Question

All

In my application, I am really confused that how to set the project flow in wordpress.

There are 3 Users. 1. Admin : High level mgmt 2. Doctors : Add patients reports 3. Patients : Can see reports added by doctors.

I am considering post as a reports.

Prob 1: How to assign specif (user)doctor to patient(user)? While patient(user) fill the registration form.

Prob 2: After patient select doctor while filling the form, now doctor can generate reports to specific users(patients).

Prob 3: How display specific category post(Patients Reports) to specific users(Patients)?

I Know there is no ready made plugin for it, i just want to know that how to set this flow in wordpress and which plugins can help me. What should i need to customize ?

Thanks In advance !

Answer 1

I'll take a stab. I won't include any code examples, just the path I would take.

Users

I image when you say "users" you mean different roles for users. "doctor user" is just a user with the role of "doctor" (see here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities).

So, I would start by creating 2 new roles: "doctor" and "patient".

Problem 1

The simplest way to create a relation between 2 users (a doctor and a patient) would be to use usermeta. I would store the patient's doctor user_id in the patient's usermeta. You will have to do some custom registration form to show a list of doctors (get_users( 'role=doctor' )) then save the usermeta for the new user on wp_insert_user.

Problem 2

I don't know what your reports are, but if a doctor just needs to be able to get a list of their patients, you would need to do a $wpdb->get_col() on the usermeta table (as you stored it in the patient's usermeta, you can't use the get_usermeta API.

Problem 3

Presumable you will use a custom post type for reports, and you want the patient to only be able to see their own report. To do this I would probably save some postmeta on the patient report of _patient_user_id. Then when you want to show the reports for a user you can do something like

new WP_Query( 'post_type=report&meta_key=_patient_user_id&meta_value=' . get_current_user_id() ) 

(or something similar).

Personally, I probably wouldn't use any plugins here - you could use a role manager plugin for the roles, but creating them programmatically is pretty quick. Again, you can get plugins to create your custom post types - IMO it's a lot easy and better to do it all with code.