I have a client who wants to manage a potentially large amount of records, displaying it on the site as a table. This will be about 100 rows to begin with, each containing 5 columns of information - a text field for Title, then 4 columns each to contain (a link to) a PDF file. The page will display the data ordered by the Title column.

If there were only 20 or so records, I'd probably just create a custom block type and get him to re-order the blocks manually each time he adds something new. However, this is phase one of a larger project where there may be 1000 records, which means I will need to add functionality to filter and sort the data too, so I want to start it off in the right direction and build a database driven system.

What I need advice on doing is how to add a dashboard page to add/edit/delete the current records, then I need to figure out how to display them on the website. If there is a 'Data Manager' type add-on, I'd buy that and modify it to meet my particular needs, but I'd prefer to know how to build it from scratch.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.