Showing the 100 most recently added products

Question

I want to add a page to my Magento site which displays the 100 most recently added products sorted by date added. I want this page to appear like a normal category page with pagination and layered navigation.

I was wondering if this is possible in Magento as I've read that layered navigation needs to work on one specific category, whereas I need it to work across multiple.

Ideally I would like a solution which adds layered navigation to any product collection as I would like to create a few different pages with different lists of products that will all need the layered navigation added. Thanks

Answer 1

Your choices are:

1. Write a block that queries for those products, write a template that copies the category layout. This is the worst choice
2. Realise that you want a category that contains the 100 most recently added products and then
   1. Write a cron job to update the contents of that category with the latest products. It's a great learning experience if you want it, but personally when I do this I commit the crime of writing an sql script to do it instead. This is an ok choice, the sql script is bad advice though
   2. Realise that time is money, and unless you particularly want the learning experience give @ProxieBlue his $99 for an extension that does what you want and more, written by someone who has a fair bit of rep and hasn't just come here to shill his extension. This is the wise choice

Answer 2

You can get 100 products with this below code:

 $_productCollection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
                         ->getCollection()
                         ->addAttributeToSelect('*')
                         ->addAttributeToFilter('status','1')
                         ->setOrder('entity_id','desc');
$_productCollection->setPageSize('100');