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:

and putting it back online is just as easy:

This works great for Drupal 6, but the good folks at Drupal decided to change things up for D7. We are now using a new variable, maintenance_mode. A value of 1 indicates the site is in maintenance mode, so for D7 we have this:

and to put it back online you need two commands:

Don't forget to do both commands or it won't work, the second one clears caches.