Maintenance-mode issues

Experiencing problems with the plugin also.

According to the developer’s description,

When you are logged in to WordPress as Administrator, you do have access to the normal frontend while visitors just see the maintenance message.

But it hasn’t worked that way on any site I’ve used it on. As the administrator, I have total backend access, but the frontend only shows the Maintenance Message. I really have to rate it only 1 star.

I noticed this behavior too and had sent the author an email a while ago, the fix that did it for me was easy:
resetting and saving the admins role in the profile settings helped.

it was working fine for two weeks now it is not.

To anyone with this problem now in 2008, this plugin will hijack your site. It adds a ton of Meta tags in all of your WordPress files. For more information on what they say, email me at abray918 at yahoo dot com. I know how to fix it.

I’ve been using this plugin for a couple of weeks now as I transfer over an old site to a WordPress layout. I’ve had no problems with it, nor do I have added meta tags in any of my files. I have no idea what the above poster is talking about regarding this plugin hijacking your site.

Depending on what version you are using and what your htaccess is set at, the plugin allows for the access to certain files and Meta redirect tags are put in various files on the server. If you fix the problem and deactivate the plugin, your site will return to normal. This may or may not happen to everyone. But for the posters who have had the problem (not the posters who don’t have the problem), you can use a file editor to search for the tags and then remove them. I don’t want to publish what the tag is here. If you want to know what tag to look for, send me an email to abray918 at yahoo dot com. Also, this taught me a lesson to open up all plugins and widgets, review the code before uploading and activating to a live site.

abray, why post that load of bs when all anyone has to do to refute it is look in the two small source files of the plugin? Or just search for the string ‘meta’ to see that the two instances of that string have nothing to do with meta redirect or meta refresh tags.

That said, there is a real problem with this plugin if you try to use it when you upgrade WordPress. If you deactivate the plugin when you get to the step of deactivating all plugins it is no longer working of course. But if you leave it activated so the site in in maintenance mode until the upgrade is completed, when you update the source files and try to go to the wp-admin page you are in trouble: Maintenance-mode says that it blocks access unless you are logged in as an admin. But upgrading logs you out, and maintenance-mode has no provision for logging back in as an admin user.

That’s a bug. The fix would be to have it make an exception for the login page. But the plugin’s website says that the author is no longer maintaining it.

When I got stuck during an upgrade the easy workaround was to edit maintenance-mode.php to change the return statement in the function mw_current_user_can_access_on_maintenance to always return true. That let me login as an admin user again, at which point I was able to deactivate maintenance mode, edit the file back again, and then deactivate the plugin until I or somebody else can fix it properly.