Service consumers & service providers

Hello all!

I have a Elgg 1.7 site with some users that consume services. Now I want to enable service providers to register as well, however I do not want that they stay in the same land. For instance, if the consumer search for users to add as friend, he should not find the service providers. The relationships between consumers and providers will be created in a controlled way.

So how can I do that?

The first alternative I have in mind is creating a specific user subtype (let's say 'provider'), however most plugin code does not search users by subtype. If I adopt this solution, I will need to change this code and also need to include other subtypes when querying, such as 'facebook' and 'twitter'.

The second alternative is creating a second site entity for the servide providers. So by default consumers will not find service providers by elgg standard ways and thus I can control the user experience. Just to be clear, I do not want an entire new site for service providers, I just want to keep consumers and provider in different lands. Given the conditions, I like this solution, however I might be missing something here...

Can someone comment on this? I need some guidance :)

thanks in advance!

Eduardo