Can anyone point me in the direction of a good wordpress plugin that can be used to manage a customer database for a client who does personal training/sports massage (ie, I need some sort of signup/contact form but not shopping cart facilities)?
I’m new to wordpress but fairly competent in mysql/php so I could probably code something myself or adapt an existing script but am trying to avoid reinventing the wheel…
Wordpress is great and if the plugins that they offer suit your needs that’s probably your best bet. I know only too well how dumb it is to diversify… I have a couple different small businesses all doing web based customer interaction and yet none are on the same platform… Sadness! However I still went with a central web based contact management software setup. It doesn’t solve all my bad choices for how I setup the various businesses but at least when I look at my customers I’m not looking in three places; unless I want to break them apart for reporting purposes. And yes, as you mention, anyone with web access can assist with the customers too.
I really don’t know how we did things before the interwebs came along? 
Can you give a little more info on just what’s being done here?
There are better standalone solutions if he’s looking for something to manage his client list - is there any reason he’d want to do this through wordpress or have this info online?
Just looked - googling “wordpress as crm” turns up some options like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crm/
HTH,
Steve
Ahhhh “CRM” - I knew there had to be a word for it but I didn’t know what it was. I tried searching “customer” but kept coming up with stuff about custom fields. Thanks heaps, I will have a look at that link.
Basically most of his clients find him online and sign up for training through his website so most of their info will be passed to the database that way, but he still needs to be able to access it and update it somehow. We are using wordpress because he wasn’t happy with the last site he had made for him and wants more control over the content. So a combination of the two seems ideal, but like I said I’m not that familiar with wordpress so I’m still learning what’s available and how things are done.