Can we disable Tridion publishing during a maintenance window (for couple of hours)? Is this just a matter of removing Allowed Publications from the Publishing Targets section?
3 Answers
If you want publishing disabled, I would just stop publishers' service. No need to remove targets and other stuff. You can even push notifications about maintenance. You can check how to achieve this by looking into Atila's Sos last year Tridion Developers Summit lightning talk
As Marko mentioned, if you want to suspend publishing altogether, you could just stop all Publisher Services.
If you are using Topology Manager, you can also mark individual CD Environments as "offline". This will suspend publishing to those CD Environments only.
Maybe a reason to migrate to Topology Manager based publishing? :-)
One more option could be to handle at security level:
In Publication properties, uncheck the following publish right for the intendted User group(s):