The Content Freeze plugin allows an admin to 'lock' all content on the site to prevent the site being edited.

Matheus Martins

Tom Greenwood

Tommy Ferry

adamtomat

Need to stop your clients and users from editing a site while you do maintenance or a server migration?
The content freeze plugin solves the problem of telling the client “Please don’t edit anything on the site today because your changes may be lost” and then finding out after the event that they spent the whole day making changes to the site. You want to keep your clients happy, and restricting access during maintenance and migrations helps avoid confusion and inconvenience for all involved.
The content freeze plugin allows an admin to ‘lock’ the site to prevent the anything being edited. Users can still visit the site, but no one can make changes behind the scenes without your permission.
It is very simple to use. When installed, an admin can switch the content freeze on. At that point, only the admin who activated the content freeze can log in and all other users (including other admins) are locked out temporarily. When they try to log in they will see a message teling them that the site is currently frozen and they therefore cannot login at this time. 
We plan to add some more features in the near future, including scheduling and also optimising it for use on multisite networks. Contributions welcome.

Content Freeze

I've used this plugin successfully a dozen or so times.  Yay!
I used to use Code Freeze which worked, but it hasn't been updated in 2 years (not always a bad sign since it still works fine).  
Code Freeze however is enabled/disabled by activating the plugin.  Content Freeze on the other hand includes a settings page and button to turn the freeze on/off independent of the plugin being active which is nice.
+1 for adding the ability to schedule freeze/unfreeze (it's currently in the readme as planned)



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