When working with asp.net there's a neat little solution for taking your app "offline" or maintenance mode. It's called app_offline.htm and Scott Guthrie wrote a nice tutorial on how to implement it. But we're talking django today and now djangonauts have an open source solution of their own called django-maintenancemode. Essentially, think of it as a forced "splash" page where you can provide whatever message you want to your system users. The obligatory "we're upgrading the site" would work well here.

The developers of the open source project leveraged middleware to gracefully handle requests while still allowing "internal" users to access the admin, and any logged in user having "staff" credentials still have full access to the site. Rad! This is a nice feature to have and one I can see every django app implementing.