For this weekend's GiveCamp project, my team has been tasked with adding some functionality to an existing Joomla-powered website for a non-profit.

A certain type of user will login, and have access to a personal area where they can upload files, check for messages, see tasks that have been assigned, etc.

Each user would have their own area. They would not be creating pages, and their information would only be visible to themselves (or a site-administrator, of course. No sort of weird HIPAA privacy involved).

None of us have worked with Joomla before, but we'd like to help this non-profit. We're not sure if we're searching using the wrong terms, or if we're just not finding it.

Is such a solution possible in Joomla? And/or are we better off building some standalone solution that interfaces with the same mySQL database as Joomla?