Using htaccess for temporary down time maintenance

[nmjudy]

I need to remove an old postnuke installation that keeps getting hacked into that resides in a folder called "articlebase". I plan on installing the newest version of Wordpress to display the articles in a different folder. Is there a way I can let Google know that the "articlebase" folder is under maintenance (while it appears broken)? I want to remove the Postnuke software asap, but have too many internal links pointing to the articles.

After the Wordpress installation is updated with all the articles, I plan and doing a 301 redirect from the old postnuke site page to the Wordpress version of the page.

[g1smd]

You could serve "503 Unavailable".

That's usually a safe bet.

[nmjudy]

Thanks for the quick response. :-)

If I wanted to serve a 503 unavailable in the "articlebase" folder, how would I write the .htaccess ? (I don't want to mess with my root .htaccess file) Or is there an easier way to do this?

[nmjudy]

I think I found an answer by Googling "holding page and the 503 status code". There is a good tutorial there.