I'm quite new to the DNN world, and open source project management, etc... so I'm looking for a little bit of direction here; maybe this is the best place to ask, maybe not.
I read through the document "Enhancing Membership" by Charles Nurse, updated June 21st. Many of the features in this document are exactly what I need - and it doesn't look like they've been implemented as of 4.3.4. Specifically, I am interested in the Portal Groups, and Portal Group Roles capabilities it would add... So much infact, that I'm looking into hacking the code up a bit to fit what I need... But first I thought I'd figure out what the community decided on implementing these changes.
Where would I go to figure that out? What forums or documents should I read?
Here is my scenario:
I am developing an enterprise software solution for the Skydiving industry, dropzones need a better product to manage their business... Key components include: Plane manifests, Event registration, user accounting and transaction management, and tandem reservations. The primary product is a windows forms application that runs on local computers against a local database; a local server also exposes a web app used by 'kiosk' machines, or users on the public wireless network to handle self manifesting of themselves and others; as well as viewing departure status, etc...
Offsite, will be a web server where for each dropzone exists a DotNetNuke public website; users can login, use forums, etc... a mapping exists between web users and local users, so that as long as an internet connection exists between the dropzone and the webserver; customers can make tandem reservations, fund their jump accounts, etc....
What I would like to do, is provide single sign-on capabilities between all of these portals, so that users that visit a specific dropzone's website (Skydive Chicago) will create a "RealSkydiving" user account which carries with it personal information. If the user then tries to sign into another dropzone's website (Skydive Hawaii), skydive hawaii would starting then have access to their personal information - but not before the user uses their "RealSkydiving" login to sign into the (Skydive Hawaii) website. RealSkydiving would then become a social networking oriented website designed to bring skydivers together with digital jump logs, abilities to accociate photos and videos to specific jumps, etc....
If I won't be able to accomplish this work easily; it may have to wait.... and instead i would just keep users separate per dropzone... the functionality i described is something i would like to see in the total solution by late next spring.... but as i'm finalizing the relationship between the two databases (website, and local production server) and their 'custom replication' based on rules and webservices... it would be nice to get this working now so I don't run into all sorts of database migrations issues later because of things like duplicate usernames, etc.
What does everyone think? If I can dump 80-120 hours into this and accomplish it now - that would be idea because then I won't have to worry about if i'm going to have migration issues. I have thought about just replacing the whole user roles modules alltogether with my own custom forms/modules/logic, etc... but then i'll run into issues when the next version comes out and the solution I needed has been implemented in the core components.. just in a different way than I did it :)
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt Christenson