This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Content Freeze

Description

Need to stop your clients and users from editing a site while you do maintenance or a server migration?

The content freeze plugin solves the problem of telling the client “Please don’t edit anything on the site today because your changes may be lost” and then finding out after the event that they spent the whole day making changes to the site. You want to keep your clients happy, and restricting access during maintenance and migrations helps avoid confusion and inconvenience for all involved.

The content freeze plugin allows an admin to ‘lock’ the site to prevent the anything being edited. Users can still visit the site, but no one can make changes behind the scenes without your permission.

It is very simple to use. When installed, an admin can switch the content freeze on. At that point, only the admin who activated the content freeze can log in and all other users (including other admins) are locked out temporarily. When they try to log in they will see a message teling them that the site is currently frozen and they therefore cannot login at this time.
We plan to add some more features in the near future, including scheduling and also optimising it for use on multisite networks. Contributions welcome.

Installation

The content freeze plugin is really plug and play. Just upload the plugin and activate.
1. Upload the contents of the package to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
To start/stop a content freeze, go to Settings > Content Freeze and click the Freeze Content / Unfreeze Content button.

FAQ

Will it work with all themes?

Yes, it should work fine with all themes. If you find a problem, let us know.

Does it work on multisite installations?

Yes it does, but you have to activate the freeze on each individual site within your network. Once activated, you not to visit the wp-admin url to access any individual sub-sites that are not locked (wp-login.php urls won’t work during the freeze).

In the future we hope to add a network freeze option.

Can I schedule a content freeze?

Not at this time, but we hope to add that feature soon.

Does it guarantee that no changes can be made to my site during a content freeze?

Not 100%. The only person that could make any changes to the site from inside the CMS is the person who is in control of the content freeze. It is generally safe to assume that this person will respect the content freeze and not make any changes. It is also possible for people to leave comments on your site, but we will soon add a comment lock to prevent this.

Reviews

September 3, 2016
I've used this plugin successfully a dozen or so times. Yay! I used to use Code Freeze which worked, but it hasn't been updated in 2 years (not always a bad sign since it still works fine). Code Freeze however is enabled/disabled by activating the plugin. Content Freeze on the other hand includes a settings page and button to turn the freeze on/off independent of the plugin being active which is nice. +1 for adding the ability to schedule freeze/unfreeze (it's currently in the readme as planned)
Read all 5 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Content Freeze” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “Content Freeze” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

0.1.3

  • Enhancement: ability to freeze all the network

0.1.2

  • Fixed: redirect issue when user gets logged out

0.1.1

  • Fixed: Content Freeze didn’t save setting when WP debug mode was active

0.1

  • Initial version