Some guidance needed to put this together.

I want to build a membership site with the following criteria:

(1) Users register
(2) Users compile their profile by selecting categories and tags from an available list. They are instructed to select cat/tags in order of importance and relevance. The number they can select is limited.
(3) Users can also add categories and tags to the list if they cannot find what they need. These are added to the cat/tag database.
(4) Registered users can then perform a search for other users with similar tag profiles. The search function uses the searchers own cat/tag profile as the search criteria automatically.
(5) A list of other users with similar cat/tag profiles in order of the strength of the match is the output.
(6) Strength of match is determined by shared categories and tags as well as the order in which they were selected.
(7) Users can then opt to make contact with any user in the search results or send a broadcast message to all or some of the results.
(8) Users can create sub profiles to perform new searches and choose to save them if they wish. they can also alter their own profiles to perform new searches or be found by different users.
(9) Users can also submit content to a content database by compiling a cat/tag profile for each piece of content. These become searchable with a content search.

This is the basic concept and I would like to know whether this can be done in WP and which plugins (free or paid) may be applicable. I would really appreciate some general pointers as to what direction to take in this project. I am reasonably competent in WP but have no php ability.

I realize that there is almost certainly no “out of the box” solution and workarounds will be necessary. The search functionality is a tricky one and I have had some success using the contextual related content plugin to produce a list of matches but hard to configure as a search.

Any advice will be gratefully received..

My thanks in advance.