Editing your maintenance message in OpenCart 1.5

It is good practice to set your store to maintenance mode when performing upgrades or routine maintenance. During this time, visitors to your site will receive a message stating it under temporary maintenance. Many store owners wish to customize their message and make it more specific to their task so their customers are more informed. To do this, however, you must edit an internal file. Join us below as we guide you in modifying your maintenance message for your OpenCart 1.5 store.

How to modify your maintenance message in OpenCart 1.5

1. First, log into the cPanel dashboard.
2. This leads you to the main cPanel area. From here, locate and enter the File Manager.
3. Once inside the File Manager, navigate to your store’s root folder. Most stores use the main domain, so the root folder would be public_html. If you are using a subfolder (e.g. example.com/shop) then you would look for public_html/shop.
4. Now that you are in the root folder for your store, you will several other files and folders that are related to your OpenCart application. From here, click on the catalog folder, then the language folder. At this point, the next folder can be different, depending on what language you are using on your site. We will assume the default and use English for this tutorial’s purposes. Enter the english folder and finally the common folder.
5. From inside the common folder you will see three files. Locage and highlight the one named maintenance.php and then open it for editing.
6. Inside the editor, you will see a few variables with their settings. The line of code that controls the maintenance message is below:
   $_[‘text_message’]='<h1 style=”text-align:center;”>
   We are currently performing some scheduled maintenance.<br/>
   We will be back as soon as possible. Please check back soon.</h1>’;

   Change the text in the code to your custom message. Look at our example below to see how we changed the message.

   $_[‘text_message’]='<h1 style=”text-align:center;”>
   We are editing the theme and adding more great products. <br/>
   We will be back as soon as possible. Please check back soon.</h1>’;
7. After your new message is in place, click the Save Changes button in the upper right corner of the screen to activate it. When your store is in maintenance mode, your visitors will now see the new message. Look below for a before and after comparison of the example we used in this tutorial.
   
   

   Before	After