A work in progress...

December 25, 2012 3:55 PM

Am creating a wordpress-powered site on my .com domain. It's far from being finished and looks pretty crappy right now. How can I make a "site coming soon" splash page without uninstalling wordpress from my page and starting all over again?

Hopefully this is an easy fix? I installed Wordpress right onto my main directory. Help. I am clueless about many webs things.

Merry XMas, MeFites!

posted by Miss T.Horn to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Usually, web servers are configured with a hierarchy of index pages they'll check in order until they find one that exists. Typically "index.html" is preferred over "index.php." You can exploit this by uploading a file called "index.html," which contains your coming soon splash. Note that if you are doing particularly tricky things with mod_rewrite (for permalinks), I'm not sure if this will work. There's probably also a "maintenance page" mode in Wordpress, but this should do the trick in the short term.
posted by Alterscape at 4:01 PM on December 25, 2012

You can download a Coming Soon plugin. Search for "coming soon" on the add plugin page. If you're logged in you see the site, otherwise you see the Coming Soon page.
posted by backwards guitar at 4:05 PM on December 25, 2012 [5 favorites]

This might work:

Make a splash page called home.php (just a normal html file, but named home.php).

Find the directory for the theme you're currently using (should be /wp-content/themes/theme_name underneath the directory you have wordpress installed in), and then put home.php in it.

There might be an existing home.php file already in the theme directory, in which case you'd probably want to copy it somewhere else safe or rename it something like home.original.php before you replace it.
posted by weston at 4:25 PM on December 25, 2012

Backwards guitar has it.
posted by adamrice at 4:34 PM on December 25, 2012

Yeah, Backwards Guitar's answer is better and more consistently likely to work than mine.
posted by Alterscape at 5:29 PM on December 25, 2012