How do I hide my Wordpress blog until it’s ready to go live?

Maintenance Mode graphicMaintenance Mode plugin is how you hide your blog until it’s finished

Now we’re getting busy with site designs, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to be able to build a site ‘offline’ as it were.

So I went looking for how to do that and found… (yes, you’ve guessed it) - yet another ‘how to’ shaped hole in the Googlesphere.

I was about to give up when a Canadian schoolteacher blogger caught my eye, and led me to ‘Maintenance Mode‘ from German developers Software Guide.

I laughed, I cried, I danced around the room with joy. This is exactly what I need; so simple and yet so bloody invisible. Here’s how it works - and you can have fun and make it look anyway you want!

Thanks, guys, or should I say vielen danke, Ich totally like liebe dich. Go there, don’t mind if you don’t speak German as good me, just press the buttons until the plugin downloads :-)

(BTW, don’t mind that it messes up the Flash image uploader in WP 2.6 - you can just use the Browser uploader instead)

September 4, 2008 | Filed Under WOW!, how to 

Comments

4 Responses to “How do I hide my Wordpress blog until it’s ready to go live?”

  1. Kisu @ Blog.ClassroomTeacher.ca on September 6th, 2008 1:07 am

    Glad the plug in met your needs. We use the maintenance mode for exactly what you use it for - to build your blog ‘offline’ as it were.

    WordPress is great because you can then transfer it over to another location as necessary. (We develop our school blogs on our server space before uploading them on our school servers.)

    Out of curosity… you don’t know of a way to transfer widgets over easily, do you?

    Best of luck blogging,

    Cheers, Kisu.

  2. Sam Deeks on September 6th, 2008 10:26 am

    Hi Kisu

    The plugin is a God-send, so thanks for blogging about it.

    I don’t know how to transfer widgets. I tend to keep any html code I use in widgets safe somewhere else.

    Transferring a site from one place to another is something that’s a bit of a mystery if you’re a relatively non-technical Worpress user / developer.

    Any helpful (basic) guides you know of?

  3. Kathie M. Thomas on November 11th, 2008 6:01 am

    I’m looking for something like this, but not quite. My clients are technophobic and I don’t want them logging into the blog to view it. I’d much rather just be able to hide the index.php page, ideally with an index.htm so people see that but give my clients the page extension addresses so they can view them without logging in. Do you know if that’s possible?

  4. Sam Deeks on November 11th, 2008 11:04 am

    Hi Kathie

    I don’t quite understand what you mean when you say that you don’t want your clients ‘logging in to the blog’?

    Essentially, Maintenance Mode ‘replaces’ your home page AND all the other pages in your site while you’re building it, until you’re ready to take the wraps off and go live.

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