Creating a temporary home page for clients, and hide the work in progress.

[Darwin Web Design]

Hi there,
I'm beginning to use CMSMS for my clients websites and can anyone recommend the best way for clients to view the work in progress... with a nice home page that is suitable for the public to see but the rest of the site hidden at another url until it's ready to go 'live'?  Many clients request this as they want to approve the text etc before their customers see it.

I would prefer not to have to install everything on another folder for viewing then move it all across at approval as that sounds really tricky.

I was thinking of installing and creating it all in the root directory and having a home page but the rest of the site somehow not being connected to the main home page until it's finished...

Also, if I were to use this regularly for all of my clients on a professional level, would you recommend designing most of the site on my local computer/server and uploading it all when it's ready to view or would it be reasonable to do everything online and do away with a local server setup?

Thanks,
I'm moving away from static design (which I'm very used to) to CMS (which is foreign to me at this stage).

Regards
Aussie Geck.

[cdstg]

You could make another template for the fake homepage that does not have the menu manger assigned to and just apply it to the temporary home page that way they would not see any other navigation but if they entered the correct url they could get there

What I do though is install the cms in a directory say called CMS and then upload a plan index.htm to the root directory the client looks at the site as

http://theresite.com/cms  and when we what it to go live I upload a .htaccess file with DirectoryIndex /cms/index.php
into the root directory that forces /cms/index.php  to be the index page for the site


On the other question personaly I allways edit the site localy and then just dumpout the database and import into the live site that way you also have a backup if they make changes latter on

and also you can use the template externalizer tool to do some of the desgin outside of cms if needed while you are getting it right

[Dr.CSS]

i've worked on sites with a full install in the root, they just had some temporary index.html, could be a site not ready page, then i give them the www.yoursite.com/index.php address and they can see the whole site "live" to check for changes/approval, when you are ready to go "live" just rename/remove the index.html page...

browsers default to look for index.html first then index.php so it never "sees" that .php until you take out the .html file

[Darwin Web Design]

Thank you, I appreciate both answers and so quickly!  In particular, I didn't realise about the system defaulting straight to htm first - this seems like a very easy solution and look forward to giving it a go with a new project I'm about to start.

[cdstg]

and if it defualts to the index.php before the index.htm then you can allways change that with that .htaccess eg

DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php

it looks for the first one then the next etc ect

[Darwin Web Design]

Oh how cool.  Thanks, I will add that to my growing list of little notes to refer to.  Will be handy to know this as I'll probably be using various hosting services that have their defaults set differently at times. 

[Darwin Web Design]

If you've already installed the cms, you could just create a temporary page (just copy your page template and delete the menu) - and set this page as default in the admin panel.  I do this now as part of my procedure until the client has approved the whole website.  Let me know if you need me to expand on this info.