What does it take to utilize SSL?

Question

I just purchased an SSL certificate from my hosting provider, at the request of a bank I'll be doing Credit Card transactions with. As of yet, I'm not sure if I'll be sending my users to their site to do the transactions or if I'll just be sending CC information to their site to do the transactions. My confusion is in regards to coding a developing my system. I'm building a very simple photo purchasing website, so I've opted to design my own shopping cart system. At what point do I need to utilize the SSL? Is there some sort of PHP code I'll have to use to decrypt the data sent to me via POST? Do I need to utilize it at all, or is the work already done for me by simply having a certificate (as verified by the little lock that appears in Safari)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You typically don't need to deal with the server certificate in the application logic. Just configure it into the web server; configure the application in the web server to use https.

How to do that is off-topic for StackOverflow (I'm still responding to confirm that you don't need to deal with it in PHP).