Question

Is there a way forcibly exclude items (by an attribute value) from the list.phtml view in Magento?
We have products that should be cartable, viewable individually but should not be found via searching or navigating to their category.

Answer 1

We ended up figuring this out without creating a new module. We created an override to list.php in /app/code/local/mage/catalog/block/product and included the following lines of code:

$collection->clear()
->addAttributeToFilter('my_attribute_name', array('gteq'=> 524 )) //custom attrib ID
->addAttributeToFilter('visibility', array('eq'=> 4 )) // Visibility is equal to "Catalog/Search"
->load();

Just after:

protected function _beforeToHtml()
{
    $toolbar = $this->getToolbarBlock();

    // called prepare sortable parameters
    $collection = $this->_getProductCollection();

    // use sortable parameters
    if ($orders = $this->getAvailableOrders()) {
        $toolbar->setAvailableOrders($orders);
    }
    if ($sort = $this->getSortBy()) {
        $toolbar->setDefaultOrder($sort);
    }
    if ($dir = $this->getDefaultDirection()) {
        $toolbar->setDefaultDirection($dir);
    }
    if ($modes = $this->getModes()) {
        $toolbar->setModes($modes);
    }

And before:

// set collection to toolbar and apply sort

We also added this same logic to new.php for a new products page so it would filter out products that shouldn’t be visible.

Brad