I have a WOrdPress site that a client wants to go ahead and launch the site while under development onto there live domain and web hosting account. The catch is that they want all visitors to see a fake homepage.
They can then either enter a password on this placeholder homepage or possible detect based on their IP in either case they would instead see the WordPress site that is being developed.
I am thinkig that this is likely fairly easy but was curious as to how others would go about doing it or maybe there is a simple plugin already?
Some ideas I have are to use the .htaccess file and based on IP, redirect them to the placeholder page if there IP is not in a list. Same could be done from the index PHP file. Same idea would also work but using a password which would then set a cookie or session variable.
Just looking for ideas from other on how they would do this and perhaps there is some more clever way out there?
Another idea I just thought of is I have used a plugin before which allows admin users to use a different Theme than a guest user on the WordPress site. With this method, logged in user could see the live under development site and a guest could be shown a theme that does not show any post or pages and has just basic HTML of the content we want to show guest users! I think I really like this idea as it does not require changing any code and when we go live we simply set guest to view the new theme.