WordPressIsAwesome

Do you mind elaborating a bit? I’m a little confused, unless I’m misunderstanding completely. Are you talking about repurposing ratings? But I’m not really after post attributes (I don’t think).

I would like to store “Reward Points” in a completely separate table (or custom post type), and tag them to specific Users. So that when a specific User logs in, he can only see Reward Points that he has earned (and no one else’s).

My open questions were:
– Should Reward Points be a separate table that I build queries for OR should they be custom post type? I was leaning towards custom table due to volume but am unsure if this is the correct decision.
– How can each Reward Point record in the Database be tied to a User? If I use a separate table, should I just make an additional column that stores the WordPress User (could be clunky and searching could affect performance)? If custom post type, custom field that holds WordPress User (seems equally clunky)? Or do I throw away “WordPress Users” and create my own User table?

My background is custom building php sites from scratch, which is why I’m struggling with direction within WP a bit.

Thanks much for your help!!

Thanks for the thorough and quick response. I think my inclusion of the “Posts” concept may have been misleading – I’m building most pages using “Pages” right now. I simply didn’t want to create multiple Page Templates for small structural/stylistic changes from page to page… and I also didn’t want to make the individual Theme files too complex and dependent on expecting specific content.

I think for now my answer will be shortcodes to insert a graphic or two, or columns, or tables, etc.

Thanks again for the reply.

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?

Thanks for your reply. There are actually some business reasons the site cannot be posted as well. But I can do my best to explain.

1) Regarding our site users – this is pretty straightforward. I’m holding users in a MySQL table. New users that sign up are inputted into this table, and when existing users log in their credentials are checked against this table. My question is what’s the easiest way to translate these users into WP users?

2) Regarding the trading data tool – To simplify things, let’s say we have a day table, month table, and year table. Each row in the tables is specific to a user. Each table has columns that holds trading data for the user for that day/month/year. It is displayed on the front end simply as 3 tables (named day, month, and year). We do PHP queries into our MySQL database to retrieve the relevant rows for the user that’s logged in.

Since I know WP installs its own database for you by default – I was wondering the best way for our custom tables to work with WordPress’s tables. Do I just create another Database for the custom tables and leave WordPress database alone? Or just add the tables into the WordPress database? Just wondering what the best practices here are…

Thanks so much!