Maintenance/Development Mode?

What is the best way to hide your development website from the outside world, but still let your customer see it? If i use maintenance mode then the website is just unavailable and the customer can't view it. What does everyone else do during development?

(Revo 2.2.6)

System Settings and filter by "site", Change the Site status setting to No, If you want to have a designed holding page change the Site unavailable page to the id you want to display.

For your client's to see it give them a manager login and once logged in they can view the site as normal

I use a subdomain while developing. After everything is done, i just point the www-root to my subdomain folder to make the site visible in the public.

Edit:

When the website is live, i sometimes use a second context, bound to the dev-subdomain, to add new pages.
So your client can review the new pages/functionality on the dev-subdomain.
If everything is ok, the new page can be moved to the live-context.

Emily, there are a number of ways to manage this. PaulP's answer is the typical method: give the customer an Admin user for MODX and then point them to the site. Other methods would be as Dasltsch and put into a context on a subdomain; or, you could Vapor the site into MODX Cloud and inject it into a Dev Cloud and show it to them there. It would be public but with an obscure URL.

Quote from: smashingred at Jan 29, 2013, 06:18 PM

Emily, there are a number of ways to manage this. PaulP's answer is the typical method: give the customer an Admin user for MODX and then point them to the site. Other methods would be as Dasltsch and put into a context on a subdomain; or, you could Vapor the site into MODX Cloud and inject it into a Dev Cloud and show it to them there. It would be public but with an obscure URL.

All the above would work, however it depends how much time you want to put into restricting access, my answer is the simplest and will take 2 mins to setup and wouldn't be public, if however if you are hosting on the MODX Cloud ( which I recommend ;-) ) go with jay's method.

Great, thanks guys, that was just what i needed!

There is also StageCoach, which lets you stage resources for later update. The updated resources are all in the Staged Resources folder so the client can look them over without them being exposed to the public.

StageCoach is probably not right for you because the client (or you, if doing a demo) has to select each page to look at and can't browse through the site because all links will point to the public pages.

Site status and Site unavailable page works fine for most of the cases. i dont want people to go around and seeing errors while doing changes XD