[wp-hackers] Display 'nice' error message

[Paul Menard]

Hi all, Happy Monday (if there is such a thing).

Last week I was migrating a site to a private server for a client.  
This is a high traffic site using WP 2.x. The site was running on a  
shared server with other clients but just kept eating up too many  
system resources, mainly MySQL, so the decision was made to migrate  
the site to a private server.

During the time this site was running on the shared server and MySQL  
was crashing we kept seeing the standard WP 'Can't connect to  
Database' message. Sorry, I'm not sure I can reproduce this error at  
the moment.

My question is this. Is there a way to override these type or errors  
via my template code? Looking for something like the 404.php template  
file that can be branded like the site theme. This would also  
facilitate capturing the error and controlling what gets displayed to  
the user. If not by the template override has anyone else implemented  
some form of 'nice' user error coding they would like to share?

P-