If you haven't heard already, Magento is probably one of the more reliable FREE open-source e-commerce applications out there. Not only it is reliable, it's very customizable for almost any situation.
Recently, I did a project with my company that used it for a store that specialized in personal monogram stitching on products. They requested that we remove the shopping cart functionality (yeah, a store without a cart is a bad idea) and use it to submit a shopping list instead.
From the start, I had to dig deep (7 levels +) into the PHP code to change some things to make all of it work. Toward the end of the project after hours upon hours of tweaking, hacking, and crying, we all were very happy with the results.
Then, the client came back to us and pointed out that on the list view of products, if one clicks the Magento standard "Learn More" link at the end of the short description, that the detailed page comes up with the short description again. Being so immursed in code, we didn't even stop to think about that till our client pointed it out. Everyone was expecting to see more information about the product, not the short description again. We had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen to see the long description.
The solution was simple...to switch the long description at the bottom of the detailed product page to the top where the short description was.
All the edits can be done in one file (thank goodness!) within the Magento directory:
/magento/app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view.phtml
Open the file in a text editor and go to line 81. This is the line will be replaced with the long description. Remove it by commenting it out.
Locate the long description code on the same page at line 109. Comment out this section of the code, copy and paste it directly below the commented out code at line 81.
The results will be the long description is next to the product on the product details page rather than the quick overview.
