What happens when you load a non-existent product?
i.e. when you call $product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load('1');
and a product with id 1 does not exist in the database.
One would expect $product to be null; however, it is not. I check using the following conditional:
if (is_null($product)) {
echo 'Product does not exist';
}
However, nothing is being printed. What is happening here? The debug console also tells me $product is of type "Simple". How can this be? The product with the id of 1 does not exist in my database.