Client Management

I’d appreciate if someone would help me with following issue. Sorry this is a lot to read.

I’m using WordPress as a clients profile management system. I don’t mean having clients as users, but I mean having a profile page for each client.. Let me explain more.

I created a custom post type called Clients. Each client will have a lot of details, like client type, operational type(s), shipping type(s)…etc Basically, there will be radio buttons and checkboxes for different details. My main concern is to make the system as flexible as possible, where the system’s users can add more details, like adding a new client type, which eventually ends up on the posts edit page and the front end. The same goes for all the details which will be integrated.

I had different thoughts about how I’d approach this. I’ll explain my approaches, and I’d appreciate if you can tell me what if I missed something. I thought of taxonomies and custom fields. I used different plugins like Toolset Types, Pods, and a lot more.

Taxonomies gave me a better look and usability in the front end, but gave me a more complicated post edit page, because I had to do more categorization, and because of the large amount of taxonomies panels. Still it’s easier to add new taxonomies.

Custom fields, on the other hand, gave me a neater post edit page than taxonomies, but it’s harder to add new custom fields and harder to integrate any newly added custom fields in the front end and moreover they’re not flexible when it comes to filtering and they’re are not linked when output in the front end (only text, not hyperlinks).

Ultimately, I’d like to have different sections in the post edit page where I can integrate both custom fields and custom taxonomies in the same panel. Below are two examples of what I’ll need to have.

For example, I’d like to have a Section with a title, Client Type (which is just a title), then 3 different taxonomies (Company, Investor, Person) and a custom field for that section called “Last Update Date” which is manually input.

Another example would be more complicated. I’d like to have a section called “Business Scale” where different data will be present. Sales with radio buttons (Small, Medium, Large), similarly, Purchases (Small, Medium, Large). In the same section I’d like to have a custom field for “Number of Branches” which is basically a number which is manually input.

I hope I gave a clear idea of what I need. Let me know if I should clarify more.