Maintenance is defiantly something you would want your visitors be informed of, else it could  be understood as a unavailable site and your first time visitors might forget about it.I’ve shared in the past Wordpress addons like Offline Mode and Maintenance Mode which helps webmasters show their visitor a page showing information about the maintenance downtime and giving the option to subscribe for receiving updates.

Wartungsmodus, a wordpress plugin that shows a Maintenance Page to your blog’s visitors during the schedule maintenance time and for new visitors a custom message can also be displayed with an optional countdown timer after which the blog would be available and it also supports user defined message with HTML Support using which weblog administrators can also offers it’s first time visitors a chance to subscribe to RSS Feeds or Email Subscriptions for updates later.

The plugin can be configured and switch on/off maintenance mode from the plugin tab itself, and while the plugin is activated a warning text box is shown on all admin pages on the top indicating that maintenance mode is activated.

Allowed user role for see the blog and admin can also be set.Pages,Posts and archives can be excluded from the maintenance mode by entering the Slug of page or post as a comma-separated list in the “Excludes” textbox.

The plugin has 10 themes to choose from as the maintenance pages.Users can also use their own custom style sheet by uploading their custom css to the web server and add the url including http:// to the settings of this plugin and change the theme to “Own Theme”.

This plugin gets onto my list of default feature/plugin for Wordpress.

Download – Wartungsmodus – Maintanence Mode Wordpress Plugin.