Tutorial: Create a custom membership provider

This article explains how to build our own custom Membership Provider to let users authenticate to Sitefinity CMS using an external database or service. You can use the provider to either authenticate users for the frontend and the backend of the website.

In the Sitefinity CMS security realm, the management of users and roles is handled through the ASP.NET Membership Provider APIs. Sitefinity CMS uses its own implementations of the membership and role providers, which utilize Telerik OpenAccess to persist users and roles into Sitefinity CMS database.
Before Sitefinity CMS 4.1 it was not possible to substitute these providers, but you are now able to do this in a simple way.

The scope of this article is to build a custom Membership Provider, which persists data into an external, custom database. You will be using the Entity Framework to define the model and to handle the communication with the external database.

The article implements the methods that let you manage your external users from the Sitefinity CMS backend and be able to login to the backend with your user.

Finally, you will see how you can create a public login page that makes use of the new Membership Provider.

The following is a short video demonstrating the usage of a custom membership provider: