Do I always need to create a customer portal to leverage authenticated sites functionaliy?

Question

We are planning to create a force.com site for multiple languages. We are planning to use authenticated sites user license for the users to login and do some features. In my understanding to do this, is it mandatory to create a customer portal and associate with the force.com site always? I think the answer is yes and if so can you guys explain why I need it? Buyan

Answer 1

Yes, a customer portal is always required to make an authenticated site.

The reason is they re-used the authentication and security portion of the customer portal. This can be strange to get used to since it means that you'll be going to two locations in the setup menu to configure things. This can actually be quite nice because it allows you to have different sets of permissions, i.e. what objects and fields they can see, for different types of users of your site by creating separate profiles. For unauthenticated users everyones permissions are controlled by the Sites Guest user pseudo-profile.