Since I am constantly tweaking things here (will settle down soon), I found myself looking for an easy way to temporarily bring the site offline. I came across the Site Unavailable plugin. It did exactly what I expected it to do, but the simple
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html code that the plugin generated left a lot to be desired in terms of look and feel. I tweaked the file to add the site’s header and footer to make the unavailable message match the look and feel of the site. Being new to WordPress and too lazy to debug the PHP error message, I just suppressed them with an @. It works well with the default theme that I am using but not exactly proper with the Coffee Cup theme that I was testing. Since you will not likely hit the “Unavailable” message, here is a screen shot of the original plugin look, the default theme look and the Coffee Cup look. You can download the modified file here. There is a slight problem with the mod in that the nav bar bgcolor seems to still show. In the Site Unavailable blog, the author mentioned an option that he might include implementing a request to allow an admin to see the site. This should be done with great care, since it is very easy for one to not realize that the site is still offline in this scenario and leave it that way.
