title: Coming up with a topology for a public facing SharePoint website
body: <p>I'm currently planning the migration of a Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) website to a SharePoint 2007 publishing site.</p>
  
  <p>The top-level site is a public facing, anonymously-accessible website. It will contain two areas which need to be protected with forms-based authentication - each of which will have a distinct set of users. </p>
  
  <p>There is content in the current MCMS site which uses "Connected Postings", which is the ability to use content in multiple places without duplicating it. In SharePoint, a similar concept is supported via the Reusable Content list, but this doesn't span site collections. </p>
  
  <p>I'm thinking that this should be a single web application with three site collections. 1 for the public facing site, and the others for the two protected areas. However, I'm not sure if 1 site collection can be anonymous, with the other 2 implementing different FBA authentication providers. </p>
  
  <p>I'd like my Urls to be something like:</p>
  
  <p>www.whatever.com<br/>
  www.whatever.com/protectedarea1<br/>
  www.whatever.com/protectedarea2<br/></p>
  
  <p>Without Url rewriting, this would be difficult to do with separate web applications. </p>
  
  <p>If I end up having to go with 3 separate web applications in order to get authentication to work as desired, I will probably have to get creative with content deployment so as not to duplicate content during authoring. </p>
  
  <p>Would appreciate any thoughts, thank you!</p>