Within SharePoint how do we send data to login page rather than clicking on a sign-in button from previous page?

Question

For public facing sites in SharePoint 2010, there is a sign-in button that you click, which leads to the sign-in page. Then on the sign-in page you can enter your credentials to sign-in.

Is there a SharePoint webpart of JavaScript technique that will allow me to replace the sign-in button in the beginning, with a username and password input box. And when the user puts in their credentials and submits, it will then send that credential information to the proper log-in file to validate and log in the user.

Basically want people to sign-in right away, rather than clicking a sign-in button to take them to the sign-in page.

I tried creating an iframe to load the signing page, onto my master template. But when you hit submit, only the iframe itself changes, not the parent page which holds it.

Any tips, tricks or advice will be awesome!

FYI - this is not a windows authentication sign-in process, but a form's sign-in process.

Thanks

UPDATE 1 Thank you Sig for the rich information you mentioned below. I found the .aspx (it looks like a custom page layout with tag prefixes on it) and .cs file (handles various redirect processes depending on who is logging in), that is used to handle my current log-in page.

From Visual Studio, these 2 files are together located within a specific solution package. Would it be out of the norm if I was to copy the code from that .aspx file, with its tag prefixes, and past that onto my master template? Or is that a bad idea?

I'm learning as I go, Thanks!

Answer 1

One thing that comes into mind is to create your own welcome.ascx WebControl and replace the default one in the master page. Your custom control could hold all of your desired logic and input fields and wouldn't need to run inside an iframe.

Unfortunately I don't have a working example for you but I'd start looking at the built-in welcome.ascx and the default forms login.aspx page to put something rather quick together.

Of course this would require a server-side deployment (in SharePoint terms a "farm solution") which needs to be approved and installed by your IT operations team locally on the SharePoint Server box.

UPDATE

There might be a way to accomplish it with pure JavaScript/jQuery, but I haven't tried it myself.

Here's a stackoverflow thread which might help:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6742184/form-based-authentication-using-javascript-for-sharepoint

However, this would still require to modify your masterpage to replace/remove the default welcome.ascx WebControl functionality, AFAIK.

UPDATE 2

And this SharePoint overflow threads seems to have an answer that sounds like it would be exactly what you are looking for (don't get confused about the question title, the answer mentions FBA auth), though you need to convert the C#.NET code into JavaScript/jQuery:

Windows authentication with SharePoint Web Services via SOAP

Hope that helps.