Thread

When you’re working on new site, you’re doing a lot of creating, posting entries, editing and testing. Ideally you don’t want that content to be visible to the public or to be indexed in search engines yet (if at all for test entries).

What’s the most efficient way to do this, so that when the site goes live, you can essentially just “push a button” or change a few parameters as possible to make the site visible to the general public and search engines? Do you make the templates not only available to certain groups? Or just draft statuses for posts?

Try
http://devot-ee.com/articles/item/using-ee-built-in-http-authentication-for-restricting-development-access

You could always use the “Is system on” config in the admin -> General Configuration. Then only the super admin can see the site during development. The benefit of this is it will just display a notice saying “System off” which you could change to say something like “website coming soon”. With this option you can also make additional members (e.g. your client) able to log in and view the site.

Alternatively, you could password protect the root folder?

Or you could always develop on a Local / Dev / Staging Server and then upload when you are ready.

Don’t forget the old /robots.txt trick:

User-agent: *
Disallow /

We typically use this in combination with a splash page.