I am considering using DNN to implement a communication portal between a company and its multiple-tiered sales network. Basically, the company has a couple Distributers who each act as parent/guides to a few Dealers who in turn serve Resellers who have Salesmen who actually work with Customers. These relationships are linear with every user below the Distributers having exactly one direct parent and every user above the Customers having one or more children.
I would like to implement something like a social network allowing users to pass messages up and down their branches of the tree, but prohibiting all members from interacting with member outside of the parents above them and the children below. I know that this functionality is a long way from DNN's user/security role authentication model, but I can imagine a module which might maintain such inter-user relationship information in a seperate sql table and offering some form of editable tree-control as its user-interface. Such a module would only be made viewable and editable to users of the Administrator security role.
I am therefore looking for a dnn-user aware relationship tree manager which can handle atleast five layers of branching where every user has exactly one parental user and an unlimited number of children-users. Further, every user that has children should automatically spawn two security roles: "UserNameEditor" & "ChildofUserName". Via these security roles, pages and modules could be set up to be editable by any parental user (and all of his parents) and viewable by all of their children. Automatic page creation and templated module addition would also be nice, but are not absolutely necessary.
Such a deeply-layered and access-segregated page tree will probably require some custom menuing capabilities as well.
In the off chance that all this already exists, I thought I should post my needs here in the forums before I starting coding.
Does anybody have something like this?
If not, have I described something for which a market exists? (I want to know if I should create this thing fast&dirty for my own use, or with some thought to resale).
...and on the subject of resale, what other features should such a user-relationship-tree module have?
Thanks in advance for all the assistance.
Peace
- Colt