Sooner or later you’ll probably run into a case where you need to put up a “maintenance mode” page while working on the site (e.g. while moving a site to a different server). What’s the best way of doing that? First you create a small, static HTML page that will appear to your visitors, then you put this at the top of your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/berightback\.html$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.org/berightback.html [R=307,L]
If you still need to be able to access the live site while you perform the maintenance, you can add a condition permitting requests from your IP address. This line should be placed after the RewriteBase / line:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^00\.000\.000\.000
Be sure to replace the zeros in 00\.000\.000\.000 with the digits from your own IP address, which you can find by visiting WhatIsMyIP.com.
The simplest way would be to centralize some of the logic regarding site generation. This way you could turn maintenance mode on and redirect any non admins to a different page. This would not be hard to do, as I imagine you have some code that keeps popping up all over the place, so just extend the login functionality to check for a global variable (if you don't have any common global variables across your page you could just set it in .htaccess via setenv).
Yes, that probably is the optimal path to take in applicable cases. (The "Maintenance Mode" plugin is a great way to handle this in WordPress.) There's always someone who would prefer the .htaccess though.
[polldaddy 2039090 http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/2039090/ polldaddy]
(ok I admit I just wanted to test this "add poll within comment" stuff
Hehe. Fine with me as long as "Totally" stays the most-voted option.