Thanks for the feedback. SimpleMembershipProvider never got any traction in the community and was replaced just a year later with ASP.NET Identity.

Oh ok, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. The reason I started messing with SimpleMembershipProvider about two years ago I think was because we were thinking about allowing social media logins on our new site.

The idea of social media logins was scrapped though so we actually don't have a need for the SimpleMembershipProvider anymore. I guess what I could do as well is try to migrate all of our existing users to another provider that is fully supported.

Migrating to ASP.NET Identity seems possible, I found this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30533784/how-to-migrate-from-simplemembership-to-asp-net-identity

But will that work better with EPiServer, do you support ASP.NET Identity?

Or will I have to "downgrade" back to the standard provider used by EPiServer again? Doing this without losing any user data like the hashed passwords doesn't sound all that easy to me.

EPiServer supports that you can disable the membership system all together so that you can provide whatever authentication you want. See for example: http://world.episerver.com/documentation/Items/Developers-Guide/EPiServer-CMS/9/Security/aspnet-identity-owin-authentication/

Disabling the membership system will disable the admin UI for editing users and you need to provide a custom login page etc. To make sure users and groups can be read you need to provide a security entity provider, should work with SimpleMembership as well. This blog has an example security entity provider: http://sveinaandahl.blogspot.no/2015/11/how-to-fix-roles-in-episerver-when.html

Thanks a lot for all the good answers Per. It turns out I'm probably fine still using my extended SimpleMembershipProvider together with the new very small extended SimpleRoleProvider I posted above for EPiServer Commerce manager.

The only reason all the management buttons disappeared inside commerce manager once I swapped providers there as well turned out to be because my other user wasn't in the "Administrators" group like the old "admin" user was.

It seems like the last thing you posted there could allow me to write more code to reconfigure EPiServer CMS to handle a standard SimpleMembershipProvider which could be interesting as well. The option to disable all of that completely is very nice that we have as well.

But right now it actually seems like all the standard tools for managing users in both EPiServer CMS and Commerce manager are actually working with my current solution. So for now I don't think I'll have to do any migration or refactoring for this.

If anyone else ever wants to do this for some reason, it seems possible to make it work smoothly with all standard EPiServer functionality as long as you override:

public override string ApplicationName { get; set; }
public override MembershipUserCollection FindUsersByEmail(string emailToMatch, int pageIndex, int pageSize, out int totalRecords)
public override MembershipUserCollection FindUsersByName(string usernameToMatch, int pageIndex, int pageSize, out int totalRecords)
public override MembershipUser GetUser(object providerUserKey, bool userIsOnline)
public override MembershipUser GetUser(string username, bool userIsOnline)
public override void UpdateUser(MembershipUser user)

That is code I would like to throw away though but as long as it works with both EPiServer CMS, Commerce and Commerce manager I'll just keep it. It's not too bad as long as it works.

But this feature request is probably not all that interesting for many since SimpleMembership is no longer the future standard provider for ASP.NET MVC and since it also has several workarounds to use it anyways.