So I was checking out this option and it's great! BUT, I was thinking there needs to be a little more to it...
If the site is "closed" - there is no way for the person to ever get back to the site once it "re-opens". Since closed.html is a static page - refreshing does nothing and there are no other links on it. So unless the user backs out of the url to index they will never know when the site is back up...unless they close their browser and come back to the site later.
SO, what I did was to add a meta refresh tag to the head:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=/index.php">
This way the page tries to load index.php every 2 seconds so if someone happens to be on closed.html when the site "re-opens" they will automatically be re-directed. I also added some text to let them know what was happening:
"Our site is being upgraded - please be patient - you will be re-directed shortly once the upgrade is complete. You can also CLICK to refresh."
(and the word click is a link to index). This way they are more likely to stay and click rather than just closing the browser)
Nothing major but I think a nice upgrade to an already neat plugin. Anyone can easily modify closed.html themselves but maybe someone that's more of a beginner might not be able to.
The other thing I was thinking about was is there a way for the site to be accessible for testing to someone who is logged in? (while remaining closed to everyone else) Right now, there is no way to test the site w/o "re-opening" it...
Lastly, why does mod_rewrite have to be enabled for this plugin to work? If I manually un-comment the appropriate lines in .htaccess the plugin works just fine w/o mod re-write enabled...I am using this plugin now by manually changing .htaccess but it would a lot easier if I could just do it through the backend...mod_rewrite is NOT enabled on my sites...
Thanks for the consideration,
Mike