Forge Server Spawn Interaction/Protection

I'll keep it semi short as I can.

I and a friend of mine have had a Forge Modded Server for a while and we want to set it up so players that join can't damage spawn, but can interact with things like pressure plates, buttons, and other redstone blocks while at the same time stopping mob spawning. But we'd like it so OPs can still modify spawn as well. We have mods that let us also interact with little shops and the like we'd like players to be able to use these but all settings we try seem to disable this, or don't work.

We've tried mods like FeedTheBeast, NoOpSpawnProtection (it has the things we want but doesn't seem to work?), the default spawn protection setting in the config files.

My friend has heard of a method that uses command blocks but we lack a way to maintain interaction with blocks using the same command blocks in a separate string.

I'm looking for any suggestions or pointers for what to try or use to get our protected, but still interact-able spawn.