Make Product Not Show Up

Is there a way to make a product not show up in any of the categories, or make it visible to anyone viewing the shopping cart, but still be able to have it available? We would want this so we can give people the url to order the product directly, but not have people just surfing our main website be able to find it.

There is not, at this time, an elequent way to do this ...

You can, however, setup products like this but it would require some customization ...

I take it that the hidden products would not be all inclusive ... meaning that Fred doesn't get to see all hidden products just because you said he could see one hidden product, correct?

You are correct. I would want to be able to link directly to the product page from other websites we have, but I just don't want people on our shopping cart page to see it.

If you gave Fred a link to 1 of the Products ... then he clicked it and went to product _info ...

And the Prev/Next was active ...

And there were 12 products in the Category that Fred's product is in ...

Is Fred allowed to see the other 11 Products? :unsure:

Yea, that would be fine if Fred saw the other products.

Then ... this can be done with minimal fuss so to speak ... :smile:

Make a Category:
Private (or Hidden or something that is okay to see in the breadcrumb or blank and you just remember the no name cat is your jidden cat)

Set the categories_status to 0 or OFF

Make a subcategory:
Private (or Hidden or something that is okay to see in the breadcrumb or blank and just remember the no name subcat is the hidden cat of the hidden cat)

This categories_status is left at 1 or ON

Now add a Product to this cat ...

Edit the Product in the products table and change the products_date_added to be outside of your New Products definition ... meaning old ... so if your New Products is the last 60 days you need this products_date_added older than 60 days ...

If you don't have New Products defined ... you should ... go to the Configuration ... Maximum Values ...

New Product Listing - Limited to ...
Limit the New Product Listing to
0= All Products
1= Current Month
7= 7 Days
14= 14 Days
30= 30 Days
60= 60 Days
90= 90 Days
120= 120 Days

The only thing to adjust would be the search and the All Product listing so that any product in the category would not show ...

One method to do that is to exclude the master_categories_id for this category of products ...

The could be other tweaks needed ... but this is one of the more simple and straight forward methods to hide products accept to those you give specific links to ...

If this is really important, however, it should be custom coded in a method to truely prevents anyone or anything, as in spiders, from finding these products ...

It is not hard to code ... just time consuming to customize everything for this ...

Thanks! Your help is always appreciated.