I'm an iPhone Developer and I've recently got into web development. At the moment I have two sites on the internet, and on one of them, I have a very simplistic CMS I've made.
Firstly, do I need to implement HTTPS for this?
If so, is there a good tutorial on getting started with this? What steps do I need to set this up?
Make sure your hosting provider supports https (SSL). You should be able to generate or upload your own certificate using their admin panel.
The SSL/TLS protocol implementation on server side has to be done in the web-server - usually Apache HTTPD.
Therefore enabling HTTPS is totally independent of PHP. You should check the documentation of the used web-server.
Think about this:
In early days, the receptionist would you give a safe box at the hotel's safe box room to put your valuable stuff there and you also would get a key to open that box.
When you would go to that box latter to open it, you would realize that two keys are required to open that box. One is your key and the other one is at the reception. One of them is never enough. You would need both to open it.
That's exactly what is happening for SSL either. If you transfer valuable (sensitive) data back and forth between your browser and server, you need SSL.
