We love Drupal here at Ferlito/van Der Wyk, but as soon as we get accustomed to a certain way of doing things with Drupal, it changes. Here's one example: using Drush to put a site into maintenance mode. This drush command puts a site into maintenance mode:
drush vset site_offline 1 --always-set
and putting it back online is just as easy:
drush vset site_offline 0 --always-set
This works great for Drupal 6, but the good folks at Drupal decided to change things up for D7.