A simple way to hide your wordpress website until launch.
March 24, 2010 by: Anthony Damasco
Recently I had to revamp a website for a client. The website was using Word Press to power it and so I had to do some template editing that would make the website look very broken while I was experimenting. What I did was stop Word Press from running at all unless a get request happened.
To do this you must first find “index.php” in the root folder on your blog. It should look empty aside from loading the blog header. Then you paste in this code:
<?php
$display = $_GET['display'];if ($display !== “yes”) {
echo ‘Post a polite message letting the user know that the site is being worked on, you may use HTML in this space’;
exit();
}?>
After saving and uploading your modified index page, you will only see the message that you are echoing. If you want to see the wordpress blog you need to include ?display=yes at the end of your URL.
example: http://mysite.com/blog/?display=yes
Now you are free to experiment with the CSS without worrying about any users seeing the website break. If you have any questions about this, ask them in the comments.
-AD
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Very interesting site. Can you provide more information on this cheers?
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Thanks for the advice. Will put it to work. Tom
If though, you have an index.html and index.php (in other words keeping the old site going pre launch) would Google pick up index.php at all? Or would this need a rewrite?
Anyway I will try it and see. Thanks a lot for sharing this.
@dillinger you’ll want to rename index.html to something else.
Great idea, but now none of the pages work eg http://www.website.com/?page_id=8 now brings up the echo’ed string.
do you need to append the ?display=yes string into the page urls???
Yes, so if you wanted to see your page you would do this:
http://www.website.com/?page_id=8&display=yes
Adding that extra variable in the url will tell you code to show the site instead of the message
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Thanks for this. The override is working, but I can’t get the pages to load with display=yes. It’s still just the echo.
Thank you