Showroom mode for specifica categories

I'm porting an old shop to zencart. The old shop includes merchandise which we want to display, but in showroom only mode with no prices nor add to cart features. We have have new, relevant product which should act normally.

I've recategorized all the merchandise so that the relevant, for sale merchandise has it's its own categories. I see that you can globally set a shop into showroom only mode, but it isn't obvious how you would do that on either category by category or item by item basis.

For the purpose of SEO we really need to keep the old stuff there because it does attract visitors. And the question - is there any way to configure zen-cart to work as described - or is there an extension that will accomplish this?

I'm confortable going into mysql to make this work given the criteria. Thx...

When creating the products, be sure to select Document-General from the pulldown list beside the New Product button. The Document-General product-type has the add-to-cart feature disabled by default.

Maybe the best way would be to create the Zen cart versions of the old products as a product type that cannot be added to cart. There is a stock "document-general" product type, though that may not display appropriately - you will have to experiment and see. If that doesn't work, search the forum, tutorials and wiki for "clone product type" to make a non-cart version of product-general.

After reading the responses about Document General I played with it to see how it displays in a category listing and product detail - result, it does the job. The problem however is that it's not obvious how to convert a product to/fro after it's been created. That is easily solvable, I took a look at the products table at products_type field. Normal products are "1" and document/general are "2". The very simple solution is to do a query to update products_type from 1 to 3, or vice-versa:

mysql> update products set products_type = 3 where products_id = 1000

However, mine at this time are defined by category, so I wrote a slightly more complex script to update products_type by category. This query updates everything but those in categories 96,98:

update products
left join products_to_categories
on products_to_categories.products_id = products.products_id
set products.products_type = 3
where products_to_categories.categories_id not in (96,98)

Conversely:

update products
left join products_to_categories
on products_to_categories.products_id = products.products_id
set products.products_type = 3
where products_to_categories.categories_id in (1,2,3,4,5)

Thx for the pointers.

You've done well.

Just remember the following: while it's okay to fudge the products_type setting for 1,2,3,5 you should NEVER swap between 4 and the others because 4-music-products requires linking to several other tables and changing to 4 will leave those other tables orphaned or lacking critical data. Just a warning to keep in mind.