Rollover to secure site

Network Solutions is the host for all of my sites, and I'm bringing the first e-commerce site online this week. I've gotten the SSL certification to use for my domain already taken care of. My question is how to get the index page to initially load in the secured environment.

Can I simply use Dreamweaver (CS5) and change the name of the PowerStore index page and make a rollover index page?

The transactions are being handled through Authorize.net, if that influences your answer in any way.

You can use this handy snippet of php code that I have come up with that will automatically redirect the user to the secure version of any page on the site if they visit the non secured version of the page.

<?php if((!(isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']))) || ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] == "") || ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] == "off"))header("Location: https://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']); ?>

You would just add it to the top of any pages that you would like to only come up through https. Once the user is on the secure version of the site any relative links they click on will take them to the secure version of that page as well.

Great! I appreciate it so much!

It isn't resolving, but instead seems to be creating a never-ending loop. I sure wish I understood php better.

This code is checking the php server variable for https, this is a variable that should have a value if you are on https. The code checks to see if it is not set, if it is set but has no value, or if it is set to 'off'. If any of these three conditions are met then the page is not being served up through https. The action of this check is to send the user to this page via https.

You might be having a problem with the redirect value in the header. Rather than use the value in the code for this you should try setting the redirect like this:

header("Location: https://yoursite.com/yourpage.php");

Hard coding in the page might help it. If you would like to know more about this php setting here is the manual page that includes info for it:

reserved.variables.server.php

If the values are not like this on your server, or the code just does not work for your instance you may need to come up with a different method of sending the user to the https version of the page.

Thank you for that reference.

As usual, your customer support is fantastic. This is why I have so many licenses for your products.

One last question on this... Using the Dreamweaver site manager panel would it be possible simply to rename the index page something like "storeindex.php" and create a simple html rollover, or would this screw up other coding? Since Dreamweaver updates the links throughout the managed site it would obviously take care of the basic links, but are there other issues it wouldn't address?

There is definitely the potential to cause other parts to no longer work if the index page is used for anything other than the links, but as far as I know the main index page in your site should just be linked to and not have any real functionality on it itself.

You should make a backup of the files before you do this then test out the site by trying to login from the index page then try to go from the index page to other pages in the site. If everything seems ok then I think this would be a good alternative.