Custom Maintenance Mode Page via Redirection Plug-in
Author: Imran Yousaf
Author: Imran Yousaf
As webmaster we do upgrade and customize our web site. While blog owners do this activity more frequently. Sometimes they are customising the theme and some time they are checking their piece of code. In such time we put our site on maintenance mode and display maintenance mode page. We have many options to show maintenance mode page. Sometimes we create an index.html file with code to show the maintenance mode page. And some people like to modify the .htaccess file and get their desire. All of this needs FTP access every time we dock or un-dock website on maintenance mode. To avoid all these hassles and modifying the .htaccess file, we will try a plug-in. Using a lot of plug-ins would slow down the page loading. So avoiding dedicated plug-in for maintenance mode we are using plug-in from urbangiraffe named Redirections. This plug-in manages all redirections and 404 error along with Stats. Upload the plug-in to wordpress plug-ins folder and then using your faviourate HTML editor create a file maintenance.html of your choice. Upload this file to the root directory. Go to Tools menu of wordpress and click redirections. You will see a page with source URL and target URL fields. In source URL enter the address for which you want to enable the redirection and in target URL give the URL of maintenance page that should be www.yourdomain.com/maintenance.html. Save the setting and you are done. This plug-ins has two level of redirection Wordpress Apache. By default, all redirections are saved in wordpress module and these redirections are at wordpress level. It means that wordpress will load first and then apply redirection policy. At apache level redirection, this plug-in modifies the .htaccess file and performes server based redirection. This level of redirection is more powerful but we have to give up some stats feature. You will not have any stats information related for redirection and clicks etc. While at wordpress level, you have all this information. So option is yours and enjoy dual functionality of plug-in. Visit us on http://www.shinningpak.com/2010/01/custom-maintenance-mode-page-via-redirection-plug-in/ About the Author:
Imran Yousaf is Computer Science graduate and have vast experience of computer software and hardware. He has special expertise in Internet Marketing, SEO, Blogging, Wordpress and Thesis customisation.