I am currently finalizing the specs for building an extensive portal. My initial thought was to build a custom .NET application since my team has several years of .NET development experience. But over the last week or so, I have been trying to evaluate whether DNN will be a better fit in terms of building the portal faster as well as having a lot of functionality out-of-the-box. This is a portal with searchable company directory, web site builder for content administrators and commerce functionality. What is the best way to use DNN for something like this given that we will have build custom modules?

Is there a way to not build the portal on the DNN Framework, but rather just use the DNN Class libraries/functions for some of the CMS features we need?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!