Create a Magento Holding Page
If you’re working on a new website, it’s perfectly understandable that either your or the client will want to prevent people from seeing it until it is completely finished. This applies even more to ecommerce websites where people may try to buy something from a store which isn’t ready. The answer is to make yourself a holding page, something which is easier said than done in Magento as any modifications to the index.php file will cause the entire site to not work.
So how do you create a holding page while still being able to work on the entire shop? Easy…
1. Create a new file on your root layer to act as the holding page. Design it however you like, I’m going to keep it simple and call it ‘hold.php‘ with the following appearance. You may think of something more exciting such as “OMG New Website Coming Soon!”
2. With that file uploaded, it’s now a simple case of updating the .htaccess file. Open Magento’s long and lucrative .htaccess and find the line which defines the directory index:
DirectoryIndex index.php
…and simply change to:
DirectoryIndex hold.php
Now when you visit your website at it’s root address (www.domain.com) you will see the holding page rather than the Magento. To see your developing site simply go to www.domain.com/home
One thing I should mention: Using this method breaks Magento Connect – disable to use this service
Thanks for reading the Magento Blog at Ecommerce Web Design.
Oh, now that’s a handy use of .htaccess files. Never new about the “DirectoryIndex”, thanks for that one.
Yes, this is handy. Thank you.