Is there a way to create a login portal to access a specific store (set as a subdomain)?

Question

I have created subdomains in my Magento main installation, such as: - companyA.mydomain.com - companyB.mydomain.com - companyC.mydomain.com - ...

Here are my needs:

• I would like that employees of companyA have unique access to the webstore companyA.mydomain.com, so I think about a kind of portal access from where they can login. For instance, even if he knows that companyA.mydomain.com exists, another customer can only login to the webstore mydomain.com (I will remove the option "order as a guest" for both webstores company.mydomain.com)
• Employees of companyA could also visit mydomain.com but they must not have access to companyB.mydomain.com and companyC.mydomain.com.
• The webstores are both pointing at the same categories and products. Only the prices will change.

Could you help about the best method to get this kind of structure? Is there any Magento extensions I could use?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You can try the following:

1. define for every store their own category tree
2. install https://github.com/Vinai/groupscatalog2
3. put all the customers from companyA in group companyA
4. only allow companyA to access the tree

If you have the complete same categories

Alterantive 1

clone the tree (bad idea, but easy to make) and go with the first answer

Alternative 2

1. use https://github.com/Vinai/loginonlycatalog to make sure, that everyone has to login before accessing the page (I don't know whether you can restrict this to certain stores/websites, if not happy coding)
2. implement an observer which makes sure, that only customers can login which are of a certain customer group