I have a requirement in a project for a back office user to login via a custom login page in order to access a custom area of the site which exists outside of the Umbraco back office. I'm struggling to get it working and it doesn't create a good experience for the user to use the Umbraco login page then have to put in the url they were heading for afterwards.

I've tried a number of ways and looked at the Umbraco source and a lot of what I need seems to be tied up inside of internal methods which I can't use. The following unfortunately only works for me after logging in via the normal login page first:

  var provider = Membership.Providers["UsersMembershipProvider"];
  if (provider.ValidateUser(data.Username, data.Password))
  {
    FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(data.Username, false);
    return RedirectToAction("Create", "RegistrationManager");
  }

I've been doing some digging and have so far not found a way to specify what membership provider is used in conjunction with the FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie method.

Am I overcomplicating this and missing an obvious solution? I think possibly not as looking at the Umbraco source the back office login does not appear to be straight forward either.

Any help or advice appreciated?

Thanks, Simon