User/Customer Management – best method?

  • WordPressIsAwesome

    (@wordpressisawesome)


    11 years, 5 months ago

    Hi,

    My site sells products to “online customers”. Upon customer registration, I want to store customer-specific fields like Country, Preferred Payment Information, etc (standard stuff). When they log in, I also want to display some customer-specific data to them, such as purchases (which I will be storing in separate DB Tables).

    I’ve explored wordpress “Users” – they seem to be more geared towards people helping build your blog, rather than actual customers. Even the Subscriber Role has “Read” permissions, which gives them access to the Admin Panel (Dashboard, Users > Your Profile).

    I know there are some ways to hack this up to add some custom fields to the default WordPress User table to store the information I want – but as my use case is pretty common – I’m just wondering how everyone else is handling the storage of their customers?

    Should I create a custom “Customers” table and write my own code around it for whatever functionality I need, and only use WordPress Users for folks who will help me run my site? Or should I hack up WordPress Users to handle both folks that will help me run my site AS WELL AS my customers? I’m not looking for any gigantic retail plugins, as most of the code I’m migrating from an existing site – but if you do know of any recommended plugins solely for managing customers, that could be useful too?

    Thanks much!
    Will

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • JungleSpace.net

    (@junglespace)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    For simplicity, you can use the add_user_meta() function.

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_user_meta

    Thread Starter WordPressIsAwesome

    (@wordpressisawesome)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    Thanks for the reply. I guess firstly, it sounds like you’re suggesting best practice is stay with the 1 default WP user table – for both customers and internal employees? I guess that may make sense for simplicity sake.

    I took a look, and tried to search around for more examples on add_user_meta(), but couldn’t find much. The function by itself makes sense to me, but there wasn’t much detail on how it’s used in the context of the whole WP User process. If you have some experience with it, if you don’t mind can you briefly describe?

    JungleSpace.net

    (@junglespace)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    Yes use the same table and create new roles (customer and employee).

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_role

    If you view some of the values in the wp_usermeta table, you will get the sense of how it is being used. The user first name, last name and nickname are all stored per row in that table.

    Therefore you can use the add_user_meta function to create specific user property like country and attach it to a particular user id.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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