Posted by chellman on January 11, 2012 at 12:14am
I built an Ubercart site on Drupal 6 for a local company that sells vintage drums. Every product is unique, so they all get their own product nodes. When a product is purchased, the node gets unpublished. These guys have a pretty active presence on eBay, so items can stick around in Google or eBay searches for a while afterward, and these links can still get hit, resulting in an Access Denied page.
I know I can customize the 403 error page (have done that already), but since 403 is a more general response that could be for other stuff, I'm wondering if there's some other, more targeted way to respond to an attempt to view an unpublished node.
Comments
Why not keep it published but mark it sold?
I haven't used Ubercart, so I don't know how difficult that would be. But if you could do that, then you could downplay the sold drum set and list similar ones for sale...
True
[Edit - your answer was in the subject, which didn't appear when I replied. Totally missed it!]
This behavior was at the client's request. I guess they really don't want sold products to be shown to the extent it can be stopped. I'll look at that as an alternate way of doing it, though.
Two options
Off the top of my head I can think of two options - either use the stock tracking addon to ub and keep the products published but not for sale or try the search404 module to give the user better feedback when they land on an unavailable page
XML sitemap settings
It appears that your issue is more with XML sitemap than Ubercart. Tweaking XML sitemap settings to be regenerated more frequently should help clear links from search engines. Combined with Google's Webmaster Tools, XML sitemap can provide you with a way to clean search results for your site.
This sounds like a workflow problem
This sounds like a workflow problem. You should add another status (such as purchased) and instead of marking the node as unpublished --mark it as purchased. Then modify your theme to show what was there and possibly have a custom view that shows other available products with with similar taxonomy with a big call to action button (BUY THIS DRUM INSTEAD).
Flag and rules?
While all the suggestions above sound solid, I was planning to leave a comment similar to Frank's. You could do this with flag and rules, and then just theme the (still published) node to display only what you want. For example, you could hide the original title and image, but use data from the original node (like taxonomy terms) as arguments on the "other similar available items" view.
Trumping all of your comments..
I would keep the node active, State that the product has been sold! and have an intelligent view list similar products.
By having more nodes indexed in the google-land you are increasing your site visibility. You just need to come up with a usable design pattern to funnel the end user to your site even though the product is no longer available. Ebay does this with their products.. they keep products that have been sold on the site for up to 6 months, depending on that products popularity, with the intent of side-selling or up-selling them to the similar product.