I couldn't find the ability to bypass the maintenance page for some users. It there something I am missing? The reason we need this is to be able to test a site we are re-deploying before going live. Normally this is done by having a set token that you pass in the URL and then that user can bypass maintenance. In the absence of this I am wondering if others have solved for this?

the only out of the box I can think of, is to password secure the whole website.

That is already the case. It's an agency portal and we will be taking offline for the weekend to completely relaunch. It's a pretty thorough relaunch so there are lots of steps that have to go right and we will need to test all the changes thoroughly before opening back up. I was surprised there wasn't a token bypass or something. I guess we will need to think through how to handle maintenance as well. I am guessing an extension that catches the earliest event and returns a maintenance page based on a configuration checkbox.

You cannot bypass maintenance mode AFAIK. The general idea is that you work on a sandbox domain unknown to your customers and then push up to the production env once you're happy with it.

Thanks. Yes we are developing the site in their sandbox and we will go through 2 test re-launches in sandbox to get the steps down. But there are so many moving parts including massive record updates we wanted to test before taking maintenance off.