Software Guide

This plugin adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.

When the maintenance mode is activated, the following message is being displayed:

Of course you can fully modify this message in the plugin’s options.

Downloads

The download includes localization files for Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish (Spain, Traditional Sort) language.

Installation

This plugin can be installed in 2 easy steps:

1. Decompress the .zip archive and upload the files into your plugins folder (located at /wp-content/plugins/) or into a sub folder of the plugins folder.
2. Activate the plugin from your WordPress admin panel.

Installation instructions in other languages:

• Maintenance Mode in italiano

Usage & Options

Activation and further options

To activate the Maintenance Mode, navigate to WordPress Administration » Settings » Maintenance Mode, select ‘Activate’ and save the options. You can also change the message and various other options.

Accesss to the blog’s front-end / Roles and Capability

When you activate the maintenance mode, logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. This plugin adds the capability “access_on_maintenance” to the role “Administrator”. If you now want to achieve that for example users with the role “Editor” do also get full access to the blog when being logged in, use the plugin Role Manager and grant the capability “Access On Maintenance” for the role “Editor” or for any other role of your choice. Check out WordPress Codex » Roles and Capabilities for further information.

Template Tag is_maintenance()

You can use the template tag is_maintenance() to display a message in the theme when the maintenance mode is activated. This is helpful to not forget the enabled maintenance mode when you are logged in to Wordpress. You can add it to the header.php or index.php of the theme, example:

<?php if (function_exists('is_maintenance') && is_maintenance() ) {
	echo '<div style="padding: 3px; margin: 10px 0 10px 0; border: 2px solid red;">The Maintenance Mode is activated. Please don\'t forget to <a href="/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=maintenance-mode.php">deactivate</a> it as soon as you are done.</div>';
}?>

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: Although I deactiveted the plugin, my feeds still show the maintenance mode page. What is going wrong?
  A: This has nothing to do with the plugin directly, some other sofware is still caching your feed. Are you using feedburner? Then you should ping your blog, but please note that feedburner is not very quick, so it may take a few minutes until your feed is being displayed correctly again.
• Q: After I have deactivated the plugin, it is still showing up in Google, but when you click on the link it brings you to the live site.
  A: In general you are depending on the “Google Spider” to re-index your website. You can try to re-add your website, but the spider will return in regular waves anyhow. Check Google indexing questions for more information.
  Also, please note that Google is not very fast with re-indexing, so it can take even a week or more for Google spiders to get back to your website.
• Q: I’d like to tell the visitors a specific date/time when they should check back to my website and I don’t want to use the number in minutes.
  A: Just change the Maintenance Mode message in the plugin options and enter the date/time and/or any other information you want.
• Q: You should have a countdown feature that counts down from 1 hour to 0, then automatically enables maintenance mode, and a countdown bar should be displayed on the Wordpress site telling people how much time is left.
  A: Thank you for your suggestion. However I think the vast majority of users want to disable the plugin manually only since they may not have finished their maintenance until the time in minutes they’ve entered. But if you want to let your visitors know a more specific time when to check back to your blog, simply add a specific date/time to the maintenance mode message in the plugin options. Additionally you can use the template tag is_maintenance() to display a message in the theme when the maintenance mode is activated; this will help you to remember to disable the maintenance mode after you have finished your maintenance but are still logged in to WP.
• Q: When surfing on my blog with the Maintenance Mode activated with Internet Explorer and Safari, both browsers want to download the maintenance splash page instead of displaying. The content-type is utf8_general_ci as http header.
  A: That sounds weird. Please try to add <?php header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?> as the first line in the file maintenance-mode_site.php and let me know if this works for you.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Frank Bueltge for his “Wartungsmodus” plugin which is an extension to Angsuman Chakraborty’s plugin “Site Unavailable”. Maintenance Mode was originally based on both plugins.
• Thanks to Naoko for mentioning this plugin in her Japanese WordPress book and for her Japanese localizations.
• Thanks to Gianni Diurno for the Italian localization.
• Thanks to Ghenciu Ciprian for the Romanian localization.
• Thanks to Krzysztof Derdzikowski for the Polish localization.
• Thanks to Denis Rebaud for the French localization.
• Thanks to Alexander Kanakaris for the Greek localization.
• Thanks to Caciano Gabriel for the Brazilian Portuguese localization.
• Thanks to Víctor González for the Spanish localization.
• Thanks to Fat Cow for the Russian localization.
• Thanks to Jean-Paul Horn for the Dutch localization.
• Thanks to Asaf Chertkoff for the Hebrew localization.

Donation

Do you like my work? Any donation would be highly appreciated.

Version History and Changelog

• 4.4 [2009-12-31]:
  Bug fix with media uploader: With the “Deny non-administrators to access the blog’s back-end” option enabled, the Flash version of the Media Uploader returns the maintenance mode page when something is uploaded. This happened when uploading using an admin user.
  Bug fix: Included plugins directory so that currently enabled plugins work while in maintenance mode.
• 4.3 [2009-02-17]:
  Bug fix: is_maintenance() did not work
  Bug fix: Maintenance mode splash page was shown when maintenance mode deactivated but option “Deny non-administrators to access the blog’s back-end” activated
• 4.2 [2009-02-01]:
  New feature: Optionally use a ‘503.php’ from within the theme directory for the splash page
  New feature: Optionally deny non-administrators to access the blog’s back-end
• 4.1 [2009-01-28]:
  Bug fix: Minor bug fixes
• 4.0 [2009-01-13]:
  Bug fix: Several bug fixes.
  New feature: Added localization support.
• 3.2 [2007-08-28]:
  Bug fix: Replaced include('maintenance-mode_site.php') with include( dirname(__FILE__) . '/maintenance-mode_site.php')
  Improvement: Better HTTP header output
  New feature: Apply HTTP header ‘503 Service Unavailable’ to splash page
• 3.1 [2007-08-03]:
  Bug fix: Replaced “<?” with “<?php” in line 210
• 3.0 [2007-07-07]:
  New feature: User roles and capabilities are supported now.
  New feature: Message is displayed in administration panel when maintenance mode is activated.
  New feature: Template tag is_maintenance() is available to display a message in the theme when maintenance mode is activated.
  Bug fix: back time in HTML header was not applied.
  New feature: simplified options by removing section for second language, it can be entered in the normal message box.
• 2.3 [2007-03-04]:
  Bug fix: For the link to the administration menu, get_settings('home') was used instead of get_settings('siteurl').
• 2.2 [2007-01-01]:
  Bug fix: As long as the plugin was active the feeds didn’t work although the maintenance mode was not active.
  New feature: Plugin updated to work with Wordpress 2.1
• 2.1 [2006-11-26]:
  New feature: Maintenance Mode can be activated/deactivated in the plugin’s options, for details see comment #35.
• 2.0 [2006-06-20]:
  New feature: Added options page in the WordPress admin. Supports modification of the messages and many more.
• 1.1 [2006-04-30]:
  New feature: User levels are supported now.
• 1.0 [2006-04-29]:
  Initial release.