How is a student directory best handled in WordPress?

I am doing a WordPress site for a school. One of the pages would have a list of 20 or so students, which would include their name, photo and small blurb.

How is this type of thing handled in WordPress? I would like the user of the CMS to be able to manage this page effectively – adding/removing students etc.

I know WordPress is being used in e-commerce sites, so people who run these site must be in the same situation on their pages of products.

Should I be using plugins? Custom fields?

thanks in advance

You could create a custom post type ‘student’, with post thumbnails for the images. The post title would be their name, post content would be the blurb. If the code scares you, there are plugins to assist.

Taxonomies are also available to you, which operate like categories and tags, but can be any set of attributes or means of grouping.