If you are like me, you have some clients whom have some product descriptions that are very long and others that are very short. I personally did not like the way wp e-commerce simply just displayed the full description, making each product default page look in my option unprofessional. To solve this issue, I modified the wp e-commerce theme to display a 50 word excerpt of the full description.

Note: Remember to make a copy of any wp e-commerce theme to your WordPress theme. There is a simple move tool under the Presentation tab of the store settings to make this easy. NEVER modify the default theme in wp e-commerce theme due any updates made to wp e-commerce will overwrite the work you have done.

What you will want to do is copy the wp-products_pages.php file to your theme. Download it to your computer so you may edit it. Go to line 106 (shown below)

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<div class="wpsc_description">
<?php echo wpsc_the_product_description(); ?>
</div><!--close wpsc_description-->

Make the following change:

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<div class="wpsc_description">
<?php
$fulldesc = wpsc_the_product_description();
$excerptdesc = implode(' ', array_slice(explode(' ', $fulldesc), 0, 50));
echo $excerptdesc; //Text you want to shorten goes here
?>
</div><!--close wpsc_description-->
<div class="wpsc_description"></div>
<!--?php echo wpsc_the_product_description(); ?-->
<!--close wpsc_description-->

It’s that simple to produce an excerpt of your product description.