Magento 1 - Hide products from customers

Question

We have a problem with the visibility. We need to add some new configurable products, but the customers should not be able to see them, until we finished testing them.

How are we supposed to do this the right way?

My idea is to create a new category which is not showing in the menu, and set the URL to something cryptic like hidden_new_products_2020 so that nobody will find it, and in the product set the visibility to "Catalog" so that it does not show in the search.

But is this the official way or is there a better approach?

It would be best, if we could create the products on our non public staging (clone) shop and then just export the products and import them to our live shop. But this does not seem to be possible.

Answer 1

There is no official way to do this, ideally you would do your testing on your dev server.

The way I might do this if you really did not want users to stumble across the product and as a temporary test workaround would be to add logic to the product view template to check if the sku of the product viewed is one of your test products and then do an IP address check on the client address against a whitelist of addresses allowed to view the test products - If the address is in the whitelist the product loads as normal, if not the user is redirected, or is shown a suitable message.

You would add your IP address/es to the whitelist to let you test the products.