Allowing others to view an unpublished site

Classic General
1

Hi All

Does anyone know if it is possible with RW7 to upload an unpublished-under-construction site, so others can view it online for feedback purposes WITHOUT it being fully live and visible to all!

Many thanks in advance!

2

I guess it all depends on how sensitive the information is. In my case I don’t need super security so I’ll publish to an alternate location on my server. Perhaps something like:

If you need super security then you could always use Sitelok to protect all the pages. In my case spending $40 to use Sitelok for only this purpose isn’t worth it, but if I had super sensitive info then it would definitely be worth the expense. (Sitelok is a great solution for those needing membership sites or sites where only certainly folks can log in.)

There may be other good solutions as well, but those are the first two that came to mind for me.

1 Like
3

You could publish the site with PageSafe from Joe Workman, its a lot cheaper than Sitelok, and provide a key to let people view the site while its under construction.

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4

As @Mathew said it depends on how much protection you want. You said not visible so you would need some sort of password on the site.
Sitelok is a great product but might be overkill if all you want to do is stop people from viewing just because it’s not ready.

You can also use htacess and htpassword files to do this.
Might want to check out this video.

If all you want is to stop indexing from search engines then a robot.txt file might work for you.

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5

Thank you for your input I will give it a go!

6

At the moment I just put it in a separate folder in my main domain, nobody else will think to look at www.mysite.com/myclientsite so it’s pretty safe from wandering eyes, and search engines won’t be looking for it because it’s not in my sitemap.

7

Search engines don’t use your site map as a guide to what they should or shouldn’t index. They follow links from anywhere to anywhere to build their indexes.
They index anything they find unless you tell them not to. That’s what the robots.txt file is for.

8

Many thanks, I have bought it. do you know if a users guide is available or any tutorials. I may also post this a separate topic!

9

Hi
Joe has videos on YouTube and there he has a great forum over at weavers.space
You should check it out.
CheersMike