Client Profiles

Question

Looking to find the best approach to creating a client database. Would a plugin be best to achieve the following?

My Client Database plugin

• Store personal information and statistics about the client that will be gathered with custom fields and custom forms
• (Admin only) Dashboard Tab that opens a list area (Similar to the Users tab)
• (Admin only) “Add New” feature (Similar to the Users area of the dashboard)
• Once Admin creates a client profile. Admin can assign clients to a User
• Clients assigned to Users displays as User metadata. The clients assigned to Users will be visible in User profiles
• Dashboard widget displaying assigned clients for logged in Users with a link to the clients profile page

Is a plugin the solution for this?

Answer 1

Do they clients ever need to log in? If so, I would make them users and give them a custom role. Then add all the meta to the user profile page for that user only. In that case, see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

If not, I would make them custom post types and use something like Scribu's Posts-to-Posts plugin: https://github.com/scribu/wp-posts-to-posts, to relate that post type to the (non-client) users.

Does it need to be a plugin? Depends on how modular you want it. It could all exist as part of the theme. If this needs to be repeated on more sites easily, writing your own plugin is a good idea. Otherwise I would just edit the theme, personally, and then you are free to lean on other plugins for some of the lifting, such as the one I mentioned above.