htaccess and wordpress – again

I’ve been helping a friend with his wordpress blog/site.  He asked me to post a “maintenance” page while he works on updating his content.  So I did some research online and, although it’s not the best or correct solution, I created an additional page, commented out the wordpress lines in the .htaccess page and added a DirectoryIndex line to point to the newly created file.

This process works well for pointing to the domain to the maintenance file, but now I can not access the front page, although I can still access the admin interface at http://example.com/wp-admin/index.php

When my friend starts working on the content of his site he will probably need to view the front end, but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Update – I found out that my friend can still access the sub-pages but not the home page.