Creating an Under Construction or Coming Soon page in Magento

When building a website, you may not want random visitors snooping your pages until you are ready for them. Even while some programs allow you to build your site on your local computer and then publish when you are finished, you still may want to test your site on the live server before opening to the public. In this case, you may want to place an "Under Construction" or "Coming Soon" page in place.

The problem lies with how your hosting server looks for the first page of your site, also called the index page. The server looks for pages that are named index.htm, index.html, index.php, and default.htm, in that order. If it finds a file with one of those names, it places that as the landing page of your website. Website design programs most often create an index.html or index.php page. When publishing your site, even for testing, it is likely that the first page will begin to display to the public. This article will guide you on how to create and set up a placeholder page so that you can work on your site in the background.

How to create a custom Under Construction/Coming Soon page

1. Log into cPanel.
2. Enter the File Manager. Be sure to navigate to the root folder for the domain you are working with. If it is the primary domain, use public_html.
3. Click on New File, an icon found in the toolbar at the top of the page.
4. Next, give the file a name. Our example will be named comingsoon.html. Click on the Create New File button to complete its creation. Note this simply creates an empty file.
   
5. Now we need to edit the empty file. Highlight the filename and then click on HTML Editor. This allows you to create the page visually, no coding needed. You can make it as fancy or simple as you wish. In our example we will make it very simple.
   
6. Once you have designed your page, click on the Save button in the upper left of the tool bar. It appears as a floppy disk.
7. Now that you have created the page, you need to set the filen ame as your default for your website. Those instructions are found in our article on How to change your default index page in .htaccess. Below is a screenshot of how the page will display on the web once that is completed.
    

Source  : http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/edu/cpanel/cpanel-file-manager/coming-soon-page

OR

Step 1 - Create an under Construction HTML page

Create an index.html under construction page
Upload this page to your root magento directory
(you have already made that backup, right>?)

Step 2 - Update your .htaccess file

Add the following line to the top of your .htaccess file in the root directory of your magento installation

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Also, upload this file to your root magento directory
(rest assured if anything goes wrong, you’ve got that backup!)
This tells the system to use your index.html file before the index.php, this is essential, otherwise your site will show as usual.

Step 3 - Test your front end and continue working

Your frontend should now show the under construction / maintenance page.
To continue working on your site, simply navigate to your frontend and add /index.php
e.g.
www.yourdomainname.com - goes to the under construction HTML page
www.yourdomainname.com/index.php - goes to your website for development purposes
Once everything is backup and running, simply add a hash (#) to the command line in your htaccess file:
#DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Source : http://www.voodish.co.uk/articles/magento-under-construction-maintenance-page/

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05:26

Magento

How to change your default Index page in htaccess in Magento-Cpanel

The server looks for specifically named files as the first page of your website, also known as the index page. The default order of index file names our particular servers look through is index.htm, index.html, index.php, and finally default.htm. You can change the name of the index file your account looks for by altering the .htaccess file. Perhaps you want to have a specific custom name for your index file or maybe you are migrating from another host and the index page is named differently. This way your internal links will not be broken by renaming the index file.

What is an htacces file?

The .htaccess file is a hidden text file within your hosting account that can be very powerful. It is designed so that you can modify it to change the behavior of your website that normally would take higher access beyond your account. It acts as a liaison between your domain and the server and can perform many functions.
Learn more about htaccess

Changing your default index file via htaccess

1. First, you will need to log into your cPanel to access the htaccess file.
2. Find the Files category and click on the File Manager icon.
   
3. A popup box will appear. For the primary domain, click on the Web Root radio button. For addon domains, click on the dropdown and find your desired addon domain name. Be sure the checkbox next to Show Hidden Files is checked. Click the Go button to enter the File Manager.
   
4. You should now be in the root folder of the domain you chose. Look for the .htaccess file and right click on it. This brings up a menu. Find and click on the Edit option. If you get a popup box, simply find and click the Edit button in the lower right corner to continue to the editor.
   
5. You are now in the htaccess editor. Paste the following code at the top of the page to configure your desired index page. In our example below, we decided to make the index page of our folders named first.html.
   
   #Alternate default index page
   DirectoryIndex first.html
   You can also list more than one file in the configuration. The file will be read left to right and check for them in that order. In this example, we add index.htm, index.html, and index.php to the list. First the server will check for first.html, if it does not find a file with that name, it continues to index.htm and so on.
   #Alternate default index pages
   DirectoryIndex first.html index.htm index.html index.php
6. Be sure to hit the Save Changes button in the upper right corner to save your new htaccess configuration.

Souce From : http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/htaccess/htaccess-change-index-page

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05:24

Magento