phranque - 8:12 am on May 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

a wildcard subdomain SSL certificate is typically significantly more expensive, so it might be cheaper to get a number of single-hostname certificates.
also, if you prefer or require extended validation for your application i don't know of any certificate authorities that will supply that for a wildcard subdomain certificate.

making the entire site https, IMO, is not a good approach

with the recent moves by google to increase the number of secure searches and therefore the precipitous increase in "not provided" keywords in analytics for those referrals, i'm starting to change my philosophy regarding all-https implementations for sites.
any secure search referred to a secure url should maintain the referrer dataand therefore keywords that are made available to analytics.

the only downside i can see for using SSL site-wide is the cost of encryption.

see this for some discussion on this - Google To Change SSL Search Referrer Data:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4431397.htm [webmasterworld.com]