Today, during a routine plugin update, I discovered that WP 3.0 has a implemented a maintenance mode, which effectively takes the site “offline”. To be specific, visitors receive a message indicating the unavailability of the site during maintenance operations. Of course, I encountered a failure (most likely related to the timeout issues that I’ve been experiencing with this server) during an upgrade from the Admin Dashboard which prevented me from logging back into the site. Any attempt to pull up the blog or the admin panel resulted in a page displaying: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

The fix was to log in to the site via FTP and delete the .maintenance file located at the blog root. This restored access to the site.

However, I wish there was an option from the Dashboard which allowed an administrator to toggle maintenance mode manually, instead of automatically assuming that the site should be taken down. Upgrading from the dashboard doesn’t work 100% of the time, and I foresee that the file deletion fix will occur more frequently than one expects.