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.

Andrew’s instructions also go into the question of allowing annonymous access to parts of the site. As a big note for myself though:

You must be logged in as an administrator via Forms authentication to set the annonymous access settings.

I keep forgetting that.

I also have been having a look at the Community Kit for SharePoint. This is sort of a bunch of ‘bits’ that are useful in creating an online community of one sort or another, and the part I’ve been looking at is the Intranet/Extranet Edition. This provides a number of features for giving you web parts for login, membership creation, password reset, and so on. They’re very neat, but the whole thing seems to be stuck at a pre-beta stage, and I have had some issues with them. I’m hoping that they’re still under development – if all else fails and I have to, I’d look at fixing/debugging myself. It’d be good to get this to a full release.