does it ever store in PHPmyadmin?
To clarify, phpMyAdmin is a database management tool. Nothing is ever stored “in” phpMyAdmin. Data is stored in your database, which will be accessible using phpMyAdmin (or some other database management client).
I read from your website that it stores it in an array in wp_options
wp_options is a table where settings are stored. So as far as WP-Members is concerned, this is where it saves settings – not user data. To be more specific, all of the fields that you create are stored under the option name wpmembers_fields. But this is just the information about the custom fields, not the data that is saved when a user registers.
WordPress (and WP-Members) stores user data in two tables: wp_users and wp_userdata.
wp_users will contain a row for each user with the following columns:
- ID
- user_login
- user_pass
- user_nicename
- user_email
- user_url
- user_registered
- user_activation_key
- user_status
- display_name
All other fields are saved as entries in wp_usermeta.
Each row (user) in wp_users will have a one-to-many relationship with data in wp_usermeta. Each custom field (and several WP native fields) are stored as user meta. The table columns are:
- umeta_id (the primary key for the table)
- user_id (the primary key from wp_users)
- meta_key (the name of the custom field)
- meta_value (the custom fields data for this user_id)
is there a way where it stores it in a separate table so I can query them?
Can you query user data directly from the database? Yes. However, I would discourage that for two reasons:
First, unless you have a strong understanding of structured query language, how relational databases (and specifically, one-to-many relationships) work, and how to do table joins in your queries, it’s going to be a challenge for you.
Second, working directly in the database is a bad practice in any production environment.
That being said, and having no idea what your skill set is when it comes to writing queries, if you know what you are doing, yes, you can query users using phpMyAdmin. The answer to whether you should or not depends on this: if you read my description of the database tables and it makes sense to you, you probably will be able to do it. If the database description was confusing to you, don’t touch it.
If instead your experience with reading user data within a database amounts to single rows per user in a single table, then I would recommend exporting the user data via button the plugin puts at the bottom the Users > All Users screen and viewing/searching in a CSV or spreadsheet, or importing that CSV into another process where you have a one-to-one relationship of fields.
