Advice needed on approach to club site

Hi,

First up, apologies if this is the wrong forum!

Ok, I’m working on a website for my son’s Cub-Scout pack. The pack is split into Dens (around 15) with 4-8 boys in each. Each Den has an (adult) leader and is associated with a single school year / grade.

My site is going to be primarily open only to the parents of pack members.

Now, I want to be able to have a page for each Den that lists who the leader is and who the members are, together with the parents if they have registered with the site. Obviously, a parent may have more than one child in the pack and a child may have more than one parent, so that relationship is many <-> many.

My question is about the best approach to take. As I see it, I have two basic options:

1. Create custom post types for the boys and the Dens. Associate each boy with both members (parents) and Dens using Meta-Data and have each den have a category according to the grade / year of the boys it contains.
2. Create additional tables for the Dens, the boys and the link between them. Possibly another table to link the boys to the parents. Through a plug-in provide the pages showing membership details etc.

The latter seems more straightforward, but the former is more in keeping with the “WordPress Way”, I think.

I also want to be able to associate posts (eitehr news items or events in a calendar) with Dens and have those only show up to parents with kids in the corresponding Den. I’m not sure if that is relevant, but figgured I should include it!

Any ideas / suggestions / comments?

Thanks!