I have major upgrades this weekend and might have my site offline for 2 days. I usually use a htaccess lock but it confuses my members and they start trying to enter their forum logins in the htaccess password box. Even if I rename to box saying “SITE IS DOWN FOR UPGRADES” they still don’t ‘get it’. Ideally I would like a way to lock my entire site but have some sort of informative splash page. Is there a trick to pull this off? Thanks!
Why not create your new site in a sub-folder that you can test online. When the new site is ready then change your .htaccess file to point to the new folder?
If on the off-chance there are problems with the new site then you can quickly revert back to your current site.
it’s a php/mysql forum with 50k users. most of the upgrade is done on dev server so we’ll be applying all the changes to prod but it’s going to take a while, lot of apps and work to do…
You could create a /stopper.html file, where you show an “under construction” message, and then put this in your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine On
# Put your own IP in the next line, so you don't get the stopper, but
# everyone else does
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^1\\.1\\.1\\.1$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/stopper.html$
RewriteRule . /stopper.html [L]