In this article we will try to explain how to create your own resource model for getting data from the product flat tables. First of all you need to know why we should do this. It’s simple. For example, you have a category page with configurable products and you need to get all attribute values on this page.

Getting all options of a specific attribute in Magento is fairly easy:

$attribute = Mage::getModel('eav/config')->getAttribute('catalog_product', 'color');  
foreach ($attribute->getSource()->getAllOptions(true) as $option) {
    echo $option['value'] . ' ' . $option['label'] . "\n";
}