Need plugin to hold directory of WWI soldiers

Hi

Work has asked me to launch a World War I centenary website and I’m hoping, given that I have little to no knowledge of PHP, that I can build it using WordPress and a handy plugin!

The site will still carry articles, pictures, video etc throughout the year so WordPress makes sense but we also hope to build up a directory of soldiers from our region that fought and died in the war as a separate but extremely important part of the site.

Not only does the admin page require me to post records via multiple fields for name, rank, regiment, battalion, and many more, but I also need to be able to grab each field and lay that information out as I wish on the live site.

The records of each soldier then need to be searchable by any of those fields, such as name, rank, armed services etc as by the conclusion we’re going to be talking about thousands of records.

I will add the records for the soldiers that we already have but myself it would be great if users could register and upload records of members of their family that fought. I know users can register with you but can you give them access to post articles, or as it is in this case, records using this bespoke/plugin page?

If that’s not possible I could just have an email form with the required fields and we could upload them manually.

If you’ve managed to get to the end of this post, firstly thanks for taking the time to read and secondly, can you advise me if this is even possible please?

I’ve heard that there’s not much WordPress can’t do these days but I get the feeling this will be stretching it!

I have no problems with layout as I have a good understanding of HTML and CSS but I’ve little to no knowledge of PHP. That said, I do have someone I can call on for that.

Many thanks