One of the things I enjoy about Community Server freelancing is that you never know what your clients will want you to make Community Server do next. Today we needed Community Server to accept a login from another website. Community Server has for a long time supported various single sign-on solutions and shared membership scenarios, but these work when the CS site shares a domain, or more specifically, that domain's cookies. Our login form was on an altogether different site and domain.
For simplicity purposes I proposed a framed-in custom login approach, which is what we did. Here's a pic of the framed-in login on the remote site. My client is doing the theming, so it ain't pretty, but my job here is done.
I used a copy of /themes/[theme]/common/login.aspx as a starting point and a darned-near naked .Master file. I needed to create a custom LoginForm control to simplify login success and failure. The CS site is for an invite-only clientele, so I could get away with consolidating all failure results into a single SUCCESS ELSE {} where I added a Chameleon UnSuccess Action.
The .ASPX HTML was a simple GoToModifiedUrlActions logged=1 for success and failed=1 for failure, displaying the response placeholders accordingly.
The longer I work with Community Server the more simple the solutions seem for CS to do what my clients want it to do. Or at least I'd like to think so.