I’ve been setting up forms based authentication for SharePoint. This is pretty much a normal ASP.NET authentication set up, but I’ve been following the instructions from Andrew Connell, and the excellent instructions from Dan Attis.
In these instructions, we set up the ASP.NET database using aspnet_regsql and then use the Web Site Administration tool to check the connections and create users (if you want to know more, check out the articles). However, here I had a bit of a quirky problem. Both sets of instructions say to, in the Web Site Administration tool, select the Provider tab and then select Select a Different Provider For Each Feature (Advanced). Then click Test by each provider. The problem – no Test link beside either provider.
As I was having some problems, I decided to dig into this. I tracked through the code that makes up the Web Site Administration tool, and found that this link is only shown if your provider contains the text ‘Sql’. I kid you not…
Andy Burns' Blog 
As a follow up to those posts, I have recently posted the detailed steps along with some screenshots on setting up the required permissions in SQL Server for your application pool accounts. Here is the link:
http://www.devcow.com/blogs/jdattis/archive/2008/03/10/forms-based-authentication-application-pool-account-permissions.aspx
Thanks!
Dan
[…] As mentioned recently, I set up an FBA SharePoint site following the instructions from Dan Attis and Andrew Connell. I tried Dan Attis’ instructions first, but they didn’t actually work – for some reason, when I’d try to log in, I’d just be returned to the “Sign in” page. I repeated setting everything up using Andrew Connell’s instructions, which worked! The only differences I could see were Andrew’s instructions to add the alternate authentication provider to both the intranet and internet IIS web sites, and that Andrew’s set up started with the intranet site. I believe that second difference a red herring – either I made a mistake following Dan’s instructions and couldn’t figure out what (most likely), or the alternate authentication provider really does need to be in both sites’ (and the central admin site’s ) setups. […]