Re: How do you manage your site’s SSL security?
If you have a relatively short list of specific URLs that you would like to run over SSL, you should be able to write redirect rules in your .htaccess file.
I was going to give you a sample of how to do that but I realized that I generally suck at rewriterules. Maybe someone else can jump in with some help writing the wildcard rule.
The login widget is trickier because it appears on every page; unless you want the whole site run under https, it’ll be hard to make it visible to the user.