I need to add a user authentication page before the actual homepage of the website.
In Joomla! I just set the website offline and the offline page loads in place of the homepage but then it's automatically throwing a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" error which I would like to avoid. That's why I would like to know the other ways to load an authentication page before the homepage.
NB: I'm using Apache servers if that's relevant Thank you
A simple solution on the Apache server side is using Basic access authentication.
See the section "Getting it working" for an example. And here some answers on Stackoverflow.
Pro: If you have access to the command line and your webserver it's a 2 minute set up that blocks access to your project.
Con: Managing access this way for many users might be inconvenient. And you need access to the command line and your webserver :-)
