Symphony.

I'm building some custom authoring pages and need a way to allow the authors to login cleanly thru my custom authoring front-end. I've seen these two discussion about this topic but they are both fairly old and it isn't clear whether these are the best approach today. Anyone know what the best approach to this is?

Here are links to the two very old threads on this topic...

http://getsymphony.com/discuss/thread/25709/

Although these discussions are a little old, the same principles are still applicable, unless there have been some significant changes that I have completely missed (which is entirely possible).

I discovered the "Members" extension by brendo released Aug 2011 and gave that a try. It's working great for me.

Perfect! Glad to hear that's working out for you.