[TYPO3-dev] Custom Maintenance Pages

[Jeff Segars]

Hey guys,
I've been looking at the possibility of adding custom maintenance
pages to the TYPO3 core and wanted to get some feedback before I take
the ideas further.

There are already several places where an HTTP 503 Not Available
header is sent. This occurs mainly when a database connection is
unavailable or there's a serious problem getting the requested page
and template.  In each of these cases, the 503 header is sent and a
specific, but static error message is displayed.

I would propose that we add an equivalent to pageNotFound_handling for
the times when a page is unavailable. This would allow a customized
maintenance page to automatically be displayed when problems occur and
for the normal site to return immediately when those problems are
resolved.  I'd also suggest an Install Tool setting to manually turn
this maintenance page off and on whenever the site admin is performing
maintenance.

One area I'm not as sure about is the "Page Is Being Generated"
message. I can see how a custom page might be nice here too, but its
definitely a page that needs to be refreshed automatically and making
it completely custom HTML opens up the possibility that it doesn't get
refresh.

I've already made a first pass at a patch for this and it seems like a
pretty simple addition. Much of the hard work is done by
pageNotFound_handling and we can easily adapt that.

Any thoughts or feedback?

Thanks,
Jeff