Creating Virtual Items For Website Through Custom Post Types

Hello,

I’m fairly new to WordPress and wanted to explain a few of my ideas to those who might have a better understanding of WP/PHP before I really got started. I’ve been researching for about a week and cannot find an answer to my problem.

I have set up a private paid member site for my company which has around 500 members. The site has always revolved around new product releases, but I wanted to try and create something more to make the memberships fee seem like a better buy. I have set up a myCred system on the site so that our members can gain points as they comment, make forum posts, and interact with each other. The problem is there is nothing to really do with the points at the moment.

My idea is to create virtual items that only live on the website, that members can buy, find, trade, and sell. The first thing I want to attempt to do is a set of 8 virtual trading cards just to see how it works.

I have used Pods to create a custom post type that makes “items” that have a name, ID, description, rarity, sell value, buy value, and picture. Through a bit of work, I know I can display the picture and cost through PHP codes.

Now I want to start the lengthy process of trying to assign these items/cards to a user who buys/finds. My current plan is to create extra user meta fields that say how many of an item they currently have. So if they were to buy an item, the code would call the user meta data, add one, and rewrite it.

I then plan to create a custom page that will live on their buddypress profile that is called “inventory” that only the user can see. Here I want to write a script to determine if any item IDs are greater than zero in the user’s meta data, and if they are, then display those items in their inventory and show how many they have.

Eventually, I would like to get to the stage where I can set up stores they can sell items to, and even have a way to trade or auction items they have. But those are goals for much later in the future.

So I would like to know if what I’m describing makes sense, or if I’m gong about parts or all of it the wrong way. Are there plugins that already do parts of these things I can’t find? Are there any resources dedicated to these types of things? And do any of you have any suggestions or ideas to help get me started or pointed in the right place?

I’m very aware this is not going to be an overnight, or month, thing. I simply want to make sure I’m not about to head down a path that’s not actually possible.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and possibly respond.