I have an existing community backend and I like to use Umbraco for my presentation layer. How can I implement login/logout with .Net forms authentication? (I don't want to use the Member functionality). I have different type of users that get's access to different type of pages. How can I control this? User control?
Answer
Umbraco uses the ASP.NET member / role provider model for it's membership system, and it's a pretty straightforward step to swap the default one out for your own implementation. I've done this in the past where I wanted to authenticate members against an Active Directory store but I can't imagine it being much more difficult to authenticate against a custom database.
The benefit from this is you get full integration with the Umbraco membership system, and by using a custom role provider, editors will be able to restrict pages using the built in page-editing facilities as opposed to you having to hook in your own security controls.
You should be able to create a simple membership provider by extending the UmbracoMembershipProvider class and overriding the ValidateUser method. I haven't done this myself, but I know of others who have.
To authenticate against a custom role provider, you'll need to create a class derived from RoleProvider. The methods you'll be interested in overriding are - IsUserInRole, FindUsersInRole, GetAllRoles and GetRolesForUser.
Here's a link to a Scott Guthrie blog post which has more information on the provider API than you'll ever need to know, including the source code for the default providers.