How do I redirect drupal to another site when in maintenance mode

Question

hopefully you can help me;

I'm setting up a new Drupal 7 environment and want to setup two subdomains which are independent from Drupal itself. One for the pre-launch and another for when Drupal goes into maintenance mode.

Is there a way to do this other than using a .htaccess file? i.e. a way of doing it using Drupal itself, so that when I want to put the file into maintenance mode, I can do it quickly without having to use a .htaccess file to do it.

So essentially, I want to enable the maintenance mode in Drupal 7 and then for everyone who should currently see the page in Drupal which says that the website is down for maintenance, is redirected to a sub-domain.

Is this possible, and if it is, what do I need to do to do it?

Answer 1

You can add a template file to you theme for the maintenance page - maintenance-page.tpl.php - and write into it something like:

<?php 

drupal_goto('https://www.google.com', 307);

Just replace the google URL with your subdomain's URL.