[development] Put a site into maintenance-mode, but not for all...

[Jens Reinemuth]

Andrew Berry schrieb:
> On 6-Jan-09, at 9:23 AM, Greg Knaddison wrote:
>
>   
>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 6:25 AM, Jens Reinemuth <jens at reinemuth.info>  
>> wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi @all...
>>>
>>> i try to figure out how to put a live website into the maintenance- 
>>> mode,
>>> but leave it fully accessible by a fixed IP-Range of developers so  
>>> that
>>> bugs can be fixed and tested in a fully running site...
>>>       
>> I've thought about this problem as well and created the Maintenance
>> Helper module:
>>     
>
> That's a neat idea. Project page for sure!
>
> I could see it being useful for doing site updates. On many sites, the  
> DB is mostly read-only unless you're logged in. I wonder if,  
> especially for sites with the aggressive cache option set, if during  
> maintenance all pages would be served from the page cache, so that the  
> site never loads inconsistent data during an update.php run. Only if  
> the page wasn't cached would a maintenance message appear.
>
> Another solution is the secure_site module. I use it on development  
> sites as my IP changes to much to be useful in an .htaccess. Also,  
> many corporate clients are stuck behind a proxy, making it harder to  
> whitelist IP's. You could probably theme the secure site login page to  
> be more friendly to the general public.
>
> --Andrew
Ok...

The IPs are not the problem, as all Developers come via one Proxy-IP to
the webserver... So do the testers, project-managers, ...

Our customer is also routed via a proxy, so there should be 2 IPs to
whitelist (perhaps some more for the externals...) which should be
possible to be set via admin.

The htaccess method is not possible as it prevents those ugly pop ups
and that the page i have to realize this is also presented to
mobilephone users and absolute dummies... so if you give them
login-pages and they get access denied, they will check their logins
over and over, but if you give them an "error-page" they will simply
blame us...

Jens