1) Yes, just put the menu link/button widget somewhere on your skin and configure it as login button

2) check the URL settings of your collection

Thanks,
Just following up the SSL question. I can see an option that either forces SSL to "Always direct to URL above" or allows both http & https.
In the "URL above" section I currently have "Default collection in index.php" selected. This seems to refer to just http: So the first option seems to send https to http. So this doesn't achieve what I wanted -> to force http to https (rather the opposite).

Do I need to choose the "Absolute URL:"option and then fill it in with "https://www.mydomain.net/blog/index.php"

Thanks
Brian

Yes you could use the absolute URL.

However if you want your site to be 100% SSL it’s much better to go to your basic conf file and change the line

$baseurl = http...