Wordpress Book Exchange Plugin Equivalent?

Question

I have a client which is in need of an entirely new website. One of the features of their existing website that they wish to keep is a student book exchange, where:

• students can sign-up and post any number books that they have to sell
• set a price for their own books
• take their books down from the website once their book as been sold
• other students can search for the book by title, author, or ISBN

They do not wish to have an online payment system, so a full-fledged online store isn't an ideal substitution. Here the site with the book exchange that I am mentioning:

http://www2.gcc.edu/orgs/sga/bookx.php

Since I do not have the time to develop a content management system, or a plugin for an existing CMS, I am going to install Wordpress for them to use, largely because of its ease-of-use and flexibility.

Are there any Wordpress plugins that would serve as a good substitute for the existing book exchange, where students can sign up, but not have access to out control panels, just their books?

Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

1. Custom Post Types (there are several plugins in the repo for that)
2. Custom Meta Boxes/Fields - a good library is the »RW Meta Box« set of classes
3. Extend the search - there are several answers that show you how to do this in the [tag:search] archive.
4. Role Management: IMHO »Members« does the job best + it's well coded.
5. Reducing the interface - I got an alpha stage plugin called »WP Strip Naked« for this. ¹⁾

^{1) If you want, you can just take the parts that you need. If you think it's a nice idea and maybe need it more often, just fork it and send a pull request. Happy to accept any cowork.}