Manage user profiles with Wordpress

Question

I would like to create a website for a scholarship. For that, I want to create three pages for seeing all members of the scholarship:

• one for members of the board of trustees (people who created it)
• one for current scholars
• one for former scholars

I am new to Wordpress and this is my first serious project with it. My question is: What is the best way to handle this data. To specify my needs furter, I will describe the data a little bit more.

A record that represents a member of the board of trustees should contain the name, one image and a short text (maybe an email address later on).

A record that represents a scholar should contain the information about whether this scholar is a former or a current member. my aim is to sort the records according to this information (the site for the alumni should contain all former members). Furthermore, it should say in which class the scholar is. This should be sortable as well. The other entries should contain text or an unordered list.

I don't want a complete project or tons of sample code. I would like to get to know whether anybody has experience with a similar problem and maybe with a plugin I could use. I found many plugins that deal with user issues and therefore I want to ask for experience with one plugin or maybe some recommendations.

Update #1:

I already built this application using Django. The project with Wordpress should be a cleaner rebuilt with a better admin interface. The following links show how my desired output looks like (it is in German but the concept should be clear):

• Alumni
• current scholar

Answer 1

As you are going to enter all data by yourself you can make use of Custom Post Types.

Create 3 CPTs for each user type, Trustee, Alumni, Scholar. And with that create custom fields as per your need for each CPT.

Once all data is in, then you need is to create Custom Page templates for each post type where you can list users in your design format.

You can easily find plugins for creating CPT and Custom fields quickly.

Cheers!

Answer 2

You can create different user roles with User Role Editor. And you can get users by role with:

$my_custom_users = get_users('role=your_role_is_here');

This function return array of user search results. Use this with foreach in your custom page template:

foreach ($my_custom_users as $user){
        print_r($user);
}

For create custom page templates; Create a php file. Add this comment line to first line:

/*
Template Name: Your Custom Template
*/

Now, you can create new page in wp-admin/pages. This page include to above get and foreach codes.