How to display simple product of a configurable product in magento categories?

Question

I am making an e-commerce website and I have a lot of configurable products. Each configurable product has many options (color : red, blue...).

When I am on a category page, only configurable products are displayed. I want to see also simple product and its link is its configurable product with option pre selected.

How can I do that? Is it native? Do you know an extension for that?

If not, I will making an publish an open source one.

Thank you

Answer 1

There is an option called "visibility" in the simple product`s menu where you can change attributes like add description etc. This attribute is set to "not visbible individually" by default. You can change that to "catalog" or "catalog, search" and the simple product should show up in the assigned categories.