[ic] maintenance mode? and extra pooling idea (softgoods and travel call)

[Ed LaFrance]

At 10:27 AM 04/25/2003 -0700, you wrote:

>Hi guys
>
>I was checking out Miva Merchant (under duress). Now that Three's Company is
>off the air, I get my laughs checking out Miva :)
>
>They did have something I wouldn't mind trying to do in IC. It was called
>maintenance mode, and would allow you to put up a (I guess) site wide
>redirect to a temporary maintenance page. and lets no customers sign up X
>minutes prior... etc.
>
>What would be involved with something like this? I am guessing Apache would
>be the force to coordinate with?? I don't have much knowledge in these
>areas, but if I can have some hints/points to research on... I wouldn't have
>to research transportation. (future invention being the wheel...)
>
>Maybe if I can hash this out with a dev group member, we can have any
>interested parties pitch in $50 or so... As I am sure "maintenance mode" is
>low on the dev groups list being that Interchange needs no maintenance...
>ever 8^) $50 seems like a modest amount, and we could #1 speed up dev on
>(mortal)user desired functions, and #2 entice smaller business to pitch in
>money to the devgroup that they could not normally afford to pay for a
>sizable job, plus have a chance to repay the hard working dev group.

I usually do this:

1. edit special_pages/missing.html to add the maintenance message.
2. mv pages pages.bak
3. mkdir pages (an empty pages directory)

...now every catalog page request ends up at missing.html, but the catalog 
is still up and the admin still works. You could probably use some 
combination of PageDir and SpecialPage directories in the catalog cfg to 
achieve the same thing. For that matter, you could put something like this 
in the *_TOP regions:

[tmp page]@@MV_PAGE@@[/tmp]
[if var MAINTENANCE_MODE]       # or is that [if variable...] ?
         [if scratch page !~ /maintenance/]
                 [bounce page=maintenance]
         [/if]
[/if]

...then just set MAINTENANCE_MODE to a non-blank value in the catalog.cfg 
and Apply Changes to go into maintenance mode.

And yes, there are so many other ways...


- Ed L.
...then just setting




===============================================================
New Media E.M.S.              Technology Solutions for Business
463 Main St., Suite D         eCommerce | Consulting | Hosting
Placerville, CA  95667        edl@newmediaems.com
(530) 622-9421                http://www.newmediaems.com
(866) 519-4680 Toll-Free      (530) 622-9426 Fax
===============================================================