Let's do some hypotheticals.  Say I am hired to build an ecommerce store that will be run as a hosted "ASP" model.  Naturally the client has specific requirements for the project, in addition to the standard requirements of membership, permissions, etc.   As a developer, there are at least 2 options:  1) build it all from scratch which allows me all the flexibility I need but a longer development timeline, 2) use DNN which should cut my development time because I can use some of the built in controls but may limit my flexibility.

The question then is whether DNN is flexible enough to allow a full featured application like a hosted ecommerce store to run in its framework?    Can modules share their logic across different portals?  For example, let's say a merchant signed up for a store account and someone purchased from them and created a login account, could I persist that user's login information so that if he wanted to purchase from a different merchant who also used my store (on a different portal perhaps), he would not have to register again?

I guess the general question is how flexible is DNN in terms of hosting truly robust applications within the framework?

Is it worth it to build into DNN for the time savings which will be realized from being able to reuse common components like login and membership?  Or is better to just build from scratch so that we don't risk the possibility of running into programmatic limitations down the road?

Thanks for the reply.  So I guess the real question is -- and maybe this is the wrong place for an objective response :) -- but are the built in framework, modules and potential time savings that DNN provides enough to make it worth developing a true hosted multi-user platform within DNN?   Or are the potential limitations of having to fit within the DNN module structure too restrictive to consider DNN as the platform?

My fear is that I will reach a point in developing the system where I simply cannot do what I need to do within the constraints of the DNN module paradigm, and will need to start digging into the DNN source -- something I do NOT want to do.   I know it's a hard question to answer without knowing full details, but perhaps someone can point me to a few examples of some very robust, multiuser, scalable, hosted services and applications that run entirely within DNN.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks