If you are making major changes to your site, you might not want people to see any pages until your changes are complete. You can activate the "Site Offline" feature in the Global Configuration page within your Joomla Administrator. When this is set to On, all of your pages will be replaced by a generic page informing your site visitors that the site is undergoing maintenance.

Offline mode

If you wish to customize this page, you need an understanding of HTML so this week's tip is for more advanced users.

1. Login to your site using FTP and download /templates/system/offline.php

2. Open the offline.php file in your preferred HTML editor

3. Make whatever changes you like but don't mess with any code you don't understand. You probably want to leave the login form intact as this gives you the opportunity to test the front-end of your site while it is offline.

4. Upload your modified offline.php file to the root of your active template directory (e.g. if your template is called 'mytemplate' then save it inside the /templates/mytemplate directory)

5. Test it by putting your site into offline mode and view your front end. If something has gone wrong, you can always start again by downloading offline.php from /templates/system