By fumbling on

I have a Drupal dev site at my web host. I don't want it accessible to search engines and drop-in users yet, but most of the content will be available to anonymous users so I need to view it and test it as an anonymous user a great deal. So I can't rely on permissions to hide the site.

As an alternative, I've tried password-protecting the whole test site at the server/directory level, but then I found that I had trouble with features of my test site working such as cron and pulling in new content from RSS feeds. Is there a way around that issue? As an alternative to protecting the directory, is there a way to put the site in "offline" mode while still having cron and pulling-in RSS feed content working? If not, any other ideas beyond moving to a local test environment on my own computer, which I'd hoped to avoid if possible, as it has consequences similar to those of the other solutions I've tried above.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x