php in htaccess

Hey Ray

Just wondering how, if possible at all, you could use php within an htaccess file?

Basically, am looking to give clients the ability to turn on/off the website to do maintenance so would just have it check if a column was set to 0 or 1 so that this could be shown/hidden and then also check an ip address that they would enter (shown as ??? beloiw):

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^8\.8\.8\.8
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^???\.???\.???\.???
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.co.uk/maintenance/index.php [R=307,L]

cheers

Jamie

I think you would have to do it in the php directly and not the .htaccess.

The way I've done this in the past is to add a check on the theme page (using webassist themes) that redirects to the maintenance section if it is in maintenance mode, but allows admins to continue browsing the site to debug.

would that be using security assist and setting a permission for maintenance ?

I think just adding a recordset to check if it is maintenance mode and then redirecting to the maintenance page would be enough. Don't really need security assist, but I suppose you could set a session variable from the value and do more complex rules with security assist if it was necessary, like letting through admin.

sorry Ray, being a bit thick here.

How would the page 'know' to redirect a visitor to the maintenance page but allow admins to keep being able to browse the site?

You would write an IF statement that checked to see if they were admin and skip the redirect if they were.