How about adding a maintenance page in the admin panel that will shut user access down throughout the whole site.

Perhaps you can leave the index page visible with a notice at top of the page that the site is undergoing maintenance.
The admin will still have full access to modify and login to the site while it's in maintenance mode.

Any user logged in when you put the site in maintenance mode should get prompt that the site is about to be temporarily unavailable or it can just log them out to the maintenance notice page when they click any link. It might be more user friendly if they get like a minute warning before they get booted off the site in case they are in the middle of writing a long email or blog, that way they won't lose their work.

I think that the admin should be able to login into the live site as well when it's in maintenance mode. For example, if the admin is adding a new page to the site or changing a site layout they will need to preview what the change will look like on the live site, so instead of doing that while members are on the site, they know that they can work freely and if they have any errors at least it won't be seen by members until they take the site out of maintenance mode.

Can we have this feature as part of Skadate 7, for the non-technical Admins?
So Admin can enable it(Maintenance Page) during Emergency

Easton

I agree that it is possible to create a "Under maintenance" page and swap it in or out, but I definitely agree it would be nice if such a feature was built into the site and accessible from the admin panel.

I don't think it's too complex for Skadate to do: have a setting within admin which says something like

• "Site closed: yes/no"
• "Site closed image: sited_closed.jpg"