Welcome to Listingslab Productions

The Problem

You have a client who you are creating a WordPress website for. The client doesn't want her website to be viewable until they're happy with it, and asks you to put a holding page up while they get their copy etc finalized.

Trouble is. Once you replace that index.php page with a holding page, they can't view the site to work on it.

The Solution

Add a little bit of functionality to the wordpress system which allows logged in users to view the site, whilst sending all other users to the holding page.

Step By Step

1. Step 1: Create a holding page

   Create a new file called holding.php. This will be your simple holding page. Add your client's logo, a little text and a link to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin withe the text 'Owner Login' or something similar. Upload this page to your server.

2. Step 2: Create a conditional redirect for logged in users

   We're looking for the point in the WordPress system where we can identify a user and also use PHP's header( 'Location feature before any other headers are sent (which would create an error.
   
   Open wp-blog-header.php. This is the point. After the wp-load.php file has loaded and the function wp(); has run, we can use the get_currentuserinfo() function to tell what user_level is present.
   
   Here we set up our condition, redirecting users who are not logged in to our holding page.
   
   Edit your wp-blog-header.php file so it looks something like this & upload it to your server.
   
   Test it thoroughly, but it should work!