[darnoldy]

Originally Posted by camel101

I was instructed to come here for help...

Well, then let's see if we can give you some!

I see several concerns in implementing your project:

1. You have 3 things you need to know about each member: location, subject (with, perhaps, multiple values) & role (student, teacher, principal). It is pretty easy to create custom user fields, and compel people to supply data at signup. It is impossible to ensure that they give you true answers.

2. You say "It will be an education website where teachers, professors, principles, etc. would visit the site and communicate." This is what forums are good at. If your project works, you will build a community of members— a group of people, for whom, what they have in common is more important than their differences. My experience tells me that as people decide who they have something in common with, your three categories will be less important than other characteristics that you can't measure.

3. You also say, "We want to offer them content based on thier state or status." Though forum software can be used to offer static content (articles, newsfeeds, etc.), this is not what its best at. If this is done, my experience tells me that it is best done in a separate area, and not intermixed with discussions. With intermixing, the articles will overwhelm, and eventually extinguish, the discussions--thus killing community.

4. Once you separate this content, you have a couple of choices: you can use a CMS (Content Management System) that interacts with the forum software, but is separate; you can put the articles in their own forum and use an article-management plugin (there are a few available).

5. Selecting articles for presentation is then just a search process. It is relatively easy to create a link that will search using the content of your 3 custom fields as default parameters. The trick will be to appropriately determine the scope of the search. I can't imagine an article that would be of interest to history teachers in Kansas, that would not also be of interest to principals in Kansas or history teachers in Nebraska, and maybe social studies or civics teachers.

--a teacher in California