maintenance_mode July 04, 2012 / Updated: July 25, 2023

Provides a means to close access to your site for upgrading and testing. This is core utility that is always ative since Zenphoto 1.6 (evolved from the former site_upgrade plugin)

A button is placed in the Utility functions section of the Admin overview page to allow you to manage the state of your site. This button changes function depending on the state of the site. You may close a site, move a closed site to test mode, and then open the site.

Closing the site will cause links to the site front end to be redirected to a script in the folder plugins/site_upgrade. Access to the admin pages remains available. You should close the site while you are uploading a new Zenphoto release so that users will not catch the site in an unstable state.

After you have uploaded the new release and run setup, you place the site in test mode. In this mode only logged in Administrators can access the front end. You can then, as the administrator, view the site to be sure that all your changes are as you wish them to be.

Once your testing is completed you open your site to all visitors.

Change the files in plugins/site_upgrade to meet your needs. (Note these files will be copied to that folder during setup the first time you do an install. Setup will not overrite any existing versions of these files, so if a change is made to the Zenphoto versions of the files you will have to update your copies either by removing them before running setup or by manually applying the Zenphoto changes to your files.)

The plugin works best if mod_rewrite is active and the .htaccess file exists. If this is not the case the plugin will still work in most cases. However if you the release you are upgrading to has significant changes involving plugin loading of the front-end site there may be PHP failures due if the site is accessed while the files being uploaded are in a mixed release state.

This extension is included in the ZenphotoCMS release.

For questions and comments please use the forum or discuss on the social networks.