Using an alternate maintenance page

It might be worth explaining exactly what I did so that others who may also need to know will find it a little easier in the future.

My purpose was to display a specific html page when site maintenance was activated, because I personally disliked the way the site maintenance page is handled in Drupal.

Following the good advice at http://drupal.org/node/235463 (I selected the 2nd option), I added the following code into my template.php:

function phptemplate_maintenance_page($content, $messages, $partial) {
  drupal_goto('path/to/your/site-offline.html');
}

One of my later discoveries was that it should actually be:

function phptemplate_maintenance_page($content, $messages = TRUE, $partial = FALSE) {
  drupal_goto('path/to/you/site-offline.html');
}

Even after doing all of this I was still getting garland theme and plain old maintenance page that I didn't want. As I am not even using the Garland theme (I use Zen), I knew something was still wrong somewhere.

The solution was found at http://drupal.org/node/195435. The default theme drupal uses for maintenance is the Garland theme, irrespective of whatever theme settings you may have. This can be changed by editing your settings.php and adding the following code at the end of the file:

<?php
$conf['maintenance_theme'] = 'themeName';
?>

NOTE: both the /site/default/ directory and the settings.php file are write protected by default.

If you're not like me and don't make the mistake of naming your file incorrectly it should now work.

Despite there being no entry on http://api.drupal.org under Drupal 6 for the phptemplate_maintenance_page() function, it still exists in Drupal 6 and works perfectly.