Creating a new entity that can log into Magento (authenticate with a password and create a session)

Question

I want to add another party to the site, that can log in and do some stuff but I want it to be a separate entity (not a customer) because I don't want it to be able to make purchases and such. It would get its own "My Account" and "Dashboard" pages inside Magento, and can be managed from the backend as well.

I want this person to be able to sign in to the site and be redirected to its own account system. What is the correct approach here? Can I use Magento sessions and authentication and encryption to add this functionality or will I have to extend Customer? I would like to avoid the latter, because there's a bunch of stuff a customer has that I don't need and blocking them would be (I think) less practical than creating something new from scratch.

It occurs to me that I could also extend users in the admin panel? But I don't want to give them access to the backend, even if the role permissions are heavily restricted.

Answer 1

You can create you own module, say Vendor, based on the Mage/Customer default extension. You don't have to extend it, just copy the parts you need and make mass renaming in the editor.

I assume you also do not need the eav model for your new entity, so it easier to make it as a flat structure.

Do not forget to remove all not used code also.

• Vic: This sounds about right. I'll give it a try, but rather than copying the whole module and removing the unwanted parts, I'll try just copying what I need. That way I can avoid overlooking extra functionality that I don't want in my module.