Preparing your CMS/ Web Application to move to SSL

HTTP to HTTPS

While change and references in programs to relevant scripts is always straightforward (an odd variable here and there will fix a full site); making the change from non-SSL (http) to a fully SSL (https) website can prove time consuming if you don't want every link on the page to go click-click (redirect to SSL version).

Of course the click-click makes sure everyone gets to the write URL with some rewrite rules, it doesn't actually solve the problem of the incorrect content in the first place (contained in the CMS).

So, simple solution is to use a scheme-less URI (some poeple call this a protocol relative URL)

What is this?

All href links, includes, img src attributes etc should exclude the protocol http; instead just using //yourdomain.com instead of http://yourdomain.com

This is important as you may initially not have your https site enabled (duplicate content), but you can prepare or change all the href / img src etc links in your CMS and you'll be right to go.

Thanks to IE, there are a few issues in IE 7 and 8, but with any luck that'll be gone soon.

For those curious, it is actually the way the browsers are supposed to work see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3

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