Maintenance Plugin 1.1.0 for Geeklog Now Available

About ten months after the first release of the Maintenance plugin for Geeklog, a new version is now available.

Maintenance 1.1.0 keeps the plugin lightweight while improving compatibility, security, administration and the way visitors are handled when a Geeklog site is temporarily unavailable.

The plugin provides a simple way to put a Geeklog website into maintenance mode during upgrades, configuration changes, migrations or other administrative work.

What’s new in Maintenance 1.1.0?

One of the main goals of this release was to make maintenance mode more predictable and safer while retaining compatibility with a wide range of Geeklog installations.

Maintenance 1.1.0 is designed for:

• PHP 5.6 and later
• Geeklog 2.1.1 and later
• Geeklog versions reviewed through Geeklog 2.2.2

When maintenance mode is enabled, regular requests are now stopped before the requested page is rendered.

Visitors receive a proper HTTP 503 Service Unavailable response together with a Retry-After header. This is particularly useful for search engines because it clearly indicates that the interruption is temporary rather than suggesting that pages have disappeared.

Dedicated administrator access during maintenance

The access policy has also been improved.

The public maintenance page does not expose a login form or login link. The normal Geeklog login and administration entry points remain unavailable to regular visitors while maintenance mode is active.

Instead, authorized administrators can use a separate maintenance login URL.

Users who have the maintenance.admin permission can continue working on the site while other visitors see the maintenance message.

The plugin administration page displays the dedicated login URL and can also send it to the email address associated with the currently authenticated Geeklog account.

This makes it easier to keep a site unavailable to the public while still allowing authorized operators to complete maintenance work.

Better administration and configuration

Maintenance now includes its own entry in Geeklog's Command and Control area.

The administration page displays the current maintenance status, explains the request policy and provides access to the native Geeklog configuration interface.

Administrators can configure a custom maintenance message, while the plugin safely treats this message as plain text and escapes it before displaying it.

Installation also creates the required permission, the Maintenance Mode Admin group and the necessary Configuration API values.

An optional warning block can be installed to remind administrators that maintenance mode is currently enabled.

Easier upgrade from version 1.0.0

Existing users do not need to uninstall the previous version.

To upgrade from Maintenance 1.0.0, replace the plugin files and use Geeklog's normal plugin update process.

The upgrade routine updates the plugin metadata and creates or repairs the maintenance warning block and its topic assignments when necessary.

The installation process has also been made more robust across the supported Geeklog versions.

A small plugin for an important task

The first version of the Maintenance plugin was released in October 2025 to provide Geeklog administrators with a straightforward way to temporarily hide their website while continuing administrative work.

Version 1.1.0 builds on that idea without turning the plugin into a complex maintenance system.

It remains a small standalone plugin, but now offers better access control, clearer HTTP behavior, improved administration and broader compatibility with existing Geeklog environments.

The source code and latest version are available from the Geeklog Plugins Maintenance repository on GitHub.

You can also read the original Maintenance plugin announcement from October 2025.

As always, feedback and testing on different Geeklog and PHP configurations are welcome.