Custom post type: Disable single page, but keep archive

Question

I am looking for the best way to create custom post-types which are only used as an archive for their posts. As an example I want an archive showing all employees of a company, but I don't want the employees to have a singular page. This is a use-case that I stumbled upon various times, but never found the perfect solution.

The main requirements are:

• disable the singular view of posts;
• be able to use archive.php of the theme as the archive page;
• remove links to the singular view from WordPress.

All methods that I've found are not able to tick all the requirements above.

By setting a filter with a template_redirect for the single page, the links to the singular pages are still being shown in WordPress (and probably in sitemaps and such), which is confusing for the end-user.

By setting publicly_queryable to false the links in the back-end are removed, but so is the archive page, even though has_archive is set to true. This can be solved by creating a page with a page template that loads the posts from the post-type. But that's not ideal either.

Answer 1

I've 'fixed' my problem with the code below. This is a function that checks the post-type settings. If query_var has been set to false, the view button is removed from the post-type archive in the back-end.

For my use-case, this solves the problem. There are no links to the posts anymore.

The reason why both post_row_actions and page_row_actions is being used, is because post-types with hierarchical set to false are running through the first one, otherwise trough the second one.

function modify_list_row_actions( $actions, $post ) {
    // Retrieve the post-type object
    $post_type_object = get_post_type_object(get_post_type($post));

    // check if query_var has been set to 'false'
    if ($post_type_object->query_var == false) {
        // if so, removing the 'view' link
        unset($actions['view']);
    }

    return $actions;
}
add_filter( 'post_row_actions', 'modify_list_row_actions', 10, 2);
add_filter( 'page_row_actions', 'modify_list_row_actions', 10, 2);