BuddyPress.org

Hey:

I’m new to this; be gentle with me.

Here’s the deal: I want to set up a site that has two separate user bases. The main users will be, say, business owners. The second group will be business trainers. I want to keep the two groups separate so that the trainers aren’t spamming the business owners with “Come to my seminar!” style posts, but can interact in a civil way, answering questions, providing information and just generally helping out. It looks like there is a plug-in under development that will allow some sort of segmentation of the user base. Is that correct?

Second. One of the key features of the site will be allowing the Businessmen to comment and offer feedback on the trainers: “I went to this course, and, while he was really interesting, he covered basically the same material as this person did, and they only charged half as much.”

Is this sort of thing currently possible without a lot of hand coding (I know enough php to spell it)? Are there plug-ins/plans afoot whereby one could take and wrestle with Buddypress and get it to do something like that? I don’t have a lot of time, but I have a soft spot for WordPress, and would prefer to use Buddypress than another (paid) system.

Thanks in advance.