Protecting different websites within a magento instance

Question

I want to have 3 different websites all running from 1 magento instance. Each website will have the same root domain but different suffix eg

1. http://www.example.com/website_1
2. http://www.example.com/website_2
3. http://www.example.com/website_3

I know how to set this up but what I cant figure out is how I can protect website_2 & website_3 so that only logged in customer can view them and only customers in a particular customer group can view website_3.

I am guessing it would need to be a 3rd party extension as I cant see a native way of doing this.Can anyone point me in the right direction please.

Answer 1

https://github.com/jreinke/magento-require-login is a good starting point. It can be configured per store. I don't believe it currently supports customer group locking but it could be modified to do so.

Like @matthijshofstede said in the comments, there are a number of plugins to do this. It is not too taxing to roll your own either, you just need to monitor for the controller pre dispatch observer and check permissions at that point making sure you do not lock people out of the login page / actions