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  • Jeroen Breuer 4908 posts 12265 karma points MVP 4x admin c-trib
    Sep 14, 2011 @ 16:02
    Jeroen Breuer
    0

    Under construction page

    Hello,

    I'm going to do a big upgrade to an existing website which is already live. While doing this I would like to take the website offline because otherwise people might run into unfinished pages. What is the best way to show an "under construction" page?

    So far I have 2 options.

    1 Unpublish all the pages and create a under contrustion page which is the only published page. Everyone will get on this page. Once I'm done with everything I'll publish it again.

    2 Modify the existing "No pages found" page to show a nice message for the user. I think I only need to remove the version number from the web.config to show this page.

    I think option 2 is the is easiest, but does anyone have a better solution?

    Jeroen

  • Sebastiaan Janssen 5044 posts 15475 karma points MVP admin hq
    Sep 14, 2011 @ 16:19
    Sebastiaan Janssen
    3

    Point the current domain (www.mysite.com) to a different site in IIS with the "under construction" page on it.

    Add a new binding to the current IIS site (temp.mysite.com) and put it in your hosts file (or DNS, but that takes a while). Do all the upgrades and stuff on the temp domain.

    If you have a multisite, obviously you'll have to do this for all the domain names so that might not be very practical.

  • Jesper Hauge 298 posts 487 karma points c-trib
    Sep 14, 2011 @ 16:27
    Jesper Hauge
    0

    My take:

    Copy website to staging env. 

    Make all necessary changes in staging env. 

    Use courier to create a revision of all content on staging site

    Transfer revision to production environment

    Delete all content in production and apply courier revision

    This would hopefully mean there's only a very short period with no content on the site, but I would probably test how long it takes to delete content and apply courier revision in staging before doing it in production.

    Regards Jesper Hauge

     

  • Jeroen Breuer 4908 posts 12265 karma points MVP 4x admin c-trib
    Sep 14, 2011 @ 16:35
    Jeroen Breuer
    0

    @Sebastiaan Great suggestion. This way I can see my changes while the users get's to see under construction page.

    @Jesper We are using a lot of custom datatypes and custom tables so using Courier is not an option.

    Jeroen

  • Tim 1193 posts 2675 karma points MVP 3x c-trib
    Sep 14, 2011 @ 16:41
    Tim
    1

    You could try using the app_offline file for IIS, but I'm not sure if you can still view the site (you might be able to do it locally on the server, not 100%): http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/10/06/426755.aspx

  • Lee Kelleher 4020 posts 15802 karma points MVP 13x admin c-trib
    Sep 14, 2011 @ 17:46
    Lee Kelleher
    1

    Hi Jeroen,

    I wrote a blog post about this a while ago: http://blog.leekelleher.com/2009/09/29/putting-your-asp-net-web-application-in-maintenance-mode-using-isapi_rewrite/

    Back then I was using ISAPI_Rewrite for the conditions/rules, (this was before I had IIS7 at my disposal), but you should be able to apply the same principles to IIS7/Web.config <rewrite> rules?

    Cheers, Lee.

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