Supplemental information to my previous post:
I have successfully installed the lastest Participants Database plugin to my WordPress site
I have used the admin module to move fields around, add new fields, and add one record to the database
I have created a word press page, added the [pdb_list} shortcode with various parameters and successfully searched for my user
I want to build a totally custom search function using PHP mysql functions to connect to and execute a search against the participants database.