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Yes. You can certainly tell people about the subscriptions, anywhere you want, but unless you're prepared to make changes to your store and product models, it's easier to keep it all separate. Yes. It isn't impossible to add subscriptions to the store, but are you sure people will be looking at your online store for a subscription? If you advertise the store as a place to buy goods then they might not think it's the same place to buy access to the website. If it features prominently as a purchase place, maybe they would. You could also not offer the subscription as a "product" but as something they opt into. You can keep the details of the subscription as a sort of hidden product that they cannot add to their cart - only your PHP code can do it, which it would when the user goes through your subscription page thing. Treating the subscription as a product means you have to add a concept of conflicting products to your store. That might be useful for other things, I don't know, but if not then you're creating a lot more complexity for only one thing.

No, but I don't think you should include subscriptions in the store. A subscription is access to the site or whatever. The online store is for products. They are not the same thing.

I usually use it when dealing with mysql databases, but that's not very often. I'm not sure what you're expecting to do from it. It's fairly easy to setup and get connected to a DB so you can run queries and look through your tables and data. It has some design tools to help plan and diagram your database and the relationships between tables which take a little more effort to learn, but that's only if you want to use them. I haven't used phpMyAdmin in a long time so I'm not sure I could really compare the two, but I personally prefer having the separate desktop application like Workbench over a web app like phpMyAdmin. To use Workbench you need to be able to connect to the database server directly or via an SSH tunnel. On shared hosting that may or may not be possible, which is why many of them provide something like phpMyAdmin. For your own private server it shouldn't be a problem.

I know. If only someone would invent JOINs.