umbraco authentication

Question

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 1

I've used two approaches on my umbraco sites. Both approaches include user controls for login and logout that are responsible for authenticating a user with a custom solution and clearing credentials respectively. I also add, for both approaches, an umbracoMembersOnly attribute to any document types that I want to protect.

In the first approach, I had each individual template check to see whether or not the user was restricted from access. To abstract this, I created a siteuser class with an isMember or isLoggedIn method that was available site-wide and could be called from either an XSLT or User Control macro. The benefit to this approach is that I could tailor custom messages on each template rather than merely providing the same access denied page.

The second approach - which is the one I favor now - if to create a Permissions macro that is responsible for checking the user's right to access any page (i.e. checks for an umbracoMembersOnly attribute and, if true, checks for a session variable). This macro gets included in the master template, and so executes on every template. If the user doesn't have permission to access the current page, I redirect to the same page but with an ?alttemplate=RestrictedPage or similar appended to the query string. (Make sure that your Permissions macro checks for an alttemplate=RestrictedPage in the query string, or you'll end up in an infinite loop of redirects.)

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

You can checkout http://osMemberControls.codeplex.com