I have just a couple more things to show you here to round out the Joomla!
Essential Training Course, and one of those things is the offline mode for Joomla
Web site.
Now that we have this live, and out there on the Web, it may be that you've put
this live just for your client to see, or maybe you are testing it to make sure
that it's working before you want it really live.
There's a number of reasons you might put a Web site out on the Internet, but not
necessarily want the public to see it just yet.
You might still want it to be hidden away.
And any one of those reasons is a great reason to use the offline mode inside of
Joomla, so let me show you how that works.
In the back-end of Joomla,
we are going to go to the Global Configuration, which I can get to right here
off the control panel.
And right now there is the option here of the Site Offline.
So if I want to take the site offline, all I need to do is click Yes, and say Save,
and when I refresh the front-end of the Web site, what I will see is this page,
which just says KinetECO, Inc.
This site is down for maintenance.
Please check back again soon.
I'll have to enter my User Name and Password in order to see the front-end of this Web site.
Incidentally, the ability to log in to the offline site box here is controlled
through some of the permissions associated with ACL.
By default, I believe only Super administrators are allowed to log in.
So, let's try logging in what Joe's login, which we know works.
If I go ahead and click Log in here, notice that I am not allowed to log in to
the Web site. That's because Joe doesn't have the permissions to log in.
I only could log in with my Super administrator log in, and that will get me into the Web site.
There is a couple of things I can do to customize this screen.
It's quite plain, and you may wish to customize it a little bit, especially if
you are going to leave this up for a while.
Maybe you would like to have the logo for the company up here, or something like that.
Maybe you want to change the message from this site is down for maintenance to
this site is launching on a certain date, or something.
So you can make those changes right here inside of the Global Configuration.
The Custom Message is this text right here. As you see it, says this site is
down for maintenance.
Please check back again soon.
So we could change that to this site is down for maintenance, please check back
by 2 PM on Nov 1 for service.
And if we just say Save for that, that will change the text here on this page.
So that's nice to tell people when the site is going to be back up again, so that
they know exactly when to come back. So that is something you can customize.
The other thing you can customize is the Offline Image.
You can select that image here. You pick anything from your media manager, and
you can upload a picture to the media manager if you need to, and that will
become a picture that will display here on the offline site.
I am not going to go ahead and do this right now, but if you upload that, and
choose a picture, you will see that picture show up here on this page.
So, if you don't want your site in offline mode, though, it's very easy.
All you need to do is take the site out of offline mode, or put it online.
All you need to do is click the No button here, and say Save & Close, and when you
refresh the front-end of your Web site, you'll see that you get your Web site back,
without any special login required.
So you may find this a very helpful tool when you need to have your Web site up
and online in the real world. Great for developing with clients; you can give
your clients a login, so that they can log in to the site, and see how it's
progressing, even though they are distant from you.
So it's a great way of sharing the site while it's under construction, but you
don't want to be getting any traffic to it.