Taking an Orchard site offline while you update it

Taking an Orchard site offline while you update it: If your hosted environment does not give you a staging site and the means to swap it easily with the production environment like Azure Cloud Services do, or if you don’t have a staging database, or if you just need to take your site offline for the public while you perform data updates in the admin, you may be wondering what solutions you have, if any. IIS has an app_offline.htm feature that you can use, that will serve a static page for all requests but that’s rather brutal as it does not just take the site offline for your users, it also does so for you. While that file exists, you can do absolutely nothing with your site. You cannot access the admin, you cannot preview your changes, nothing. So when you flip the switch back, it’s anyone’s...(read more)

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