We are routinely rolling out new features which require us to publish all the pages, but we have some pages which are in the review stage and we don't want to publish those pages.
Manually maintaining the list of these pages is difficult. Is there a way to make a page not publishable? If that is possible, we will just mark it un-publishable until it is ready, then we change it back to be publishable.
For sake of completeness you could also use a custom resolver. This might look at some page level metadata to verify whether the page is publishable or not. If not publishable, remove it from the resolved set.
I still would recommend the workflow approach, as that's the solution that matches your requirement the most.
Have you looked at the workflow functionality of SDL Tridion? I think you can easily solve this using workflow, the concept is that you have an approval status on your publication targets, if your content isn't approved to the correct status, it wont publish to a specific target.
It's also possible to modify structure groups to make them 'Unpublishable' - that might also be a solution for you.
I have another thought that you can handle this through a Simple Component Template called "Disable Publishing".
You can add this Component Presentation on any page and while CP is rendering it will throw an exception and page will get failed with the proper message.
You can combine two Tridion features to achieve this:
Firstly, you create a structure group for the pages that you don't want to be publishable. Structure groups do have a Publishable flag, so you can make the structure group unpublishable.
Then all you need to do is cut and paste the pages into the non-publishable structure group. If you need to maintain structure, you can still use the same technique; just make a hierarchy of unpublishable structure groups that matches your real hierarchy.
When the pages are fully reviewed, just cut and paste them back.
