As i was building my first site on Drupal i found that when i set the site at maintenance mode the system use Minneli theme and not my custom theme, that obviously does not cut it. I needed to change it.

After several tries and searches across the net i found the solution.

phase one:

go to - sites/default/settings.php page

at the end of the file add this line:

$conf['maintenance_theme'] = 'your theme name';

But this is not the end. If you try it now nothing is changed or you just see some very strange page.

Phase two:

In your custom theme folder create a page called - maintenance_page.tpl.php and here you can do actually whetever you want: design it and use whatever variables you need.

Now you can test it and see that the maintenance mode uses your theme.

That is it. Very short and very sweet.