Building a site that matches up posts or custom database records?

I’ve been digging around quite a bit for an answer to this; sorry if I missed an answer on this forum somewhere, but I could only find one thread on database manipulation that even came close and it is 2 years old :)…Googling has also been fruitless and I just keep ending up on pages talking about database backup plugins.

Disclaimer done, here’s what I’m trying to do:

I’m a one-man shop trying to start a non-profit, and I am building a web service for this purpose. I started down the road of using Ruby on Rails for this, but over time I came to realize that as a one-man show, I just can’t spend that much time on development from scratch.

WordPress seemed like a good way to go; so I read Stephanie Leary’s book, which was a good fit for someone who understands software development but is new to WP, and I played around with setting up a couple blogs. I spent a bunch of time reasearching WP sites looking for any that are doing something similar to what I need.

I keep running into the same wall, though. My intended site is 80%+ blog-style posts and static content pages and WP will work great for what I need there, but the core functionality I need involves querying and matching up records from 2 separate tables/post categories, then asking the user to lock in a choice or choices, and then allowing for aggregation and display of statistics about how many users chose what.

One set of data consists of narrative profiles with comments etc. and seems like it could just be a WP post that I segregate for regular posts via category or something.

The other set of data could possibly be shoe-horned into posts, but it’s more like a table of organizations and another table of current offerings (not a giant inventory, just a small set for each organization).

I guess I can go with a book club kind of analogy; how can I go about setting up a WP-powered site that would allow me to:

– Allow users to post profiles of themselves and what they like to read
– Allow book clubs to post organizational profiles about themselves, and then an overview of each of the handful of books they might currently be discusssing
– Allow users to query and browse through the book clubs and books
– Allow users to select a book club and “lock-in” that book club as their choice
– Allow all the other users to also see both sets of profiles, help select the right book club for the right user, then give a thumbs-up
– Allow users to see the suggested book clubs that other users have picked out for them (in aggregate, not seeing any individual thumbs up)

So, I have googled around for sites that do anything like this that run on WP, and even on the sites that have lists of the most cool, unusual sites I can’t find any examples of anything like this, or even sites that do almost any kind of tabular data manipulation at all.

So I’m a little lost at the moment.

– Are there any solid and well-maintained WordPress plug-ins for accessing and manipulating database records in tables not native to WordPress?

– Should I be looking to use categorized posts for this and add tables that carry some extra fields that I may need, or should I be doing this with completely custom tables added to the WP database, or should I just have another MySQL database/table partition entirely?

– If I do this in such a way that I am carefully to only extend and not update/change anything in the exisiting WP database structure, do I need to worry about updates wiping me out?

– Is WP the right tool for this job? Or would it be better to try to make a hybrid site where static pages and posts are WP pages and everything else is vanilla PHP w/ MySQL or something?

Thanks for reading my diatribe ;)…any finger pointing in new directions is appreciated.