I have two seperate installs of DNN (staging and production), but I would like both to use a single database for membership data.  I tried adding a connection string (which I named "SiteMembershipServer") to one of my installs that points to another identical DNN database, and then set the connectionStringName="SiteMembershipServer" for my membership provider.  Trying this out,  membership data i still stored and received from the site database and the membership database isn't touched. 

Is the connectionStringName field for the membership provider meant to be used this way?  If not, is my only other option to write my own membership provider?

Thanks in advance...

Perhaps I was not clear previously, or maybe I don't quite understand your response.  Each site (the staging and production site) has thier own database.  However, we want a third database that is there only for membership/role/profile data that both sites can use (not to use as a complete DNN site database).  This database will still receive regular backups.  The staging site is used for  final testing and content management, and is synchronized to production every hour.  What we have run into is that when users register on the production site, those users do not show up on the staging server.  This means that any changes we make to users/roles need to be done directly in production (since the production users are not accessible through staging).  We could try synchronizing both ways, but that gets messy since you need context (ie - a user is present in production but not in staging - were they added to production and thus need to be added to staging, or were they removed from staging, and thus need to be removed from production?)  Also, I don't see why adding multiple connection string to the web.config file is a problem?  We have a large number of modules and some need to connect to databases other than DNN.  The web.config file seems like the place these should be stored.  What difference does it make how many connection strings you add to the web.config as long as you keep the DNN database connection string in there (SiteSqlServer)?

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate the help

I need to do something similar. We have some existing apps which are using an ASP.NET 2.0 membership database and we would like to have a dotnetnuke application to use this database also, but cannot add any of the dotnetnuke tables to this database. Anyone know who to do this ?