SharePoint and FBA

Question

I have been involved to develop a customized SharePoint 2010 application that uses a custom db for authentication.

Following many tutorials on the internet I was successfully able to implement FBA and the site is up and running for further content development (using BI features of SharePoint).

However, I recently came across a comment on one of the websites (dont have the link now) - For FBA, its better to extend a windows based authentication website, as administration of website becomes easy.

I wanted to know:

1. Is this statement correct?
2. Even if I am only targetting non-AD users over the internet (and using only my custom db for authentication), is it necessary to extend from a windows based authentication web app?
3. Should an FBA web app be extended from windows based or vice versa?
4. What are the pros and cons of either case?

Answer 1

1. Yes. All my FBA web applications are extended.
2. I normally have the FBA zone with the public url, and have an internal zone with the windows auth url, so only administrators can get to it
3. I normally always start with the windows auth, and extend the FBA
4. You always have issues with FBA, and it is a good idea to have the standard windows based to fallback. Things like search, need a zone to crawl, i always have it crawling the windows auth zone.