Problems with short description

Every product I've built pages for in PS4 I've used a standard 3-4 line text block that I paste into the description field over 3-4 lines and saved as the default. Then I go in and add options and when I'm done and go back and look at each product and options the short description is lost accept for one line of text. Every time!! I can't get it to keep a multi-line text description on short description. What's going on here? Why won't it maintain a general description provided on the first setup and hold onto the short description? It's really tedious to build the product options and then find out that there's text missing from the descriptions.

Need help with this. It's really bugging me and I can't imagine why it is happening...

~Kim

I've realized that it just truncates the short description completely!!! How many characters have you allowed on the short description? It's not even the fact that I'm using line breaks in the short description. Even when I type the same information on a single like with terms seperated by a blank space it still looses all the information except for the first 31 characters.

I'm trying to include this as the short description:
Surface: Lightly Textured Matte Thickness: 23 mil Optical Brightener: Yes Archival Certified: Yes

And would prefer it be formatted like this:
Surface: Lightly Textured
Matte Thickness: 23 mil
Optical Brightener: Yes
Archival Certified: Yes

And in every case what I end up getting is this:

Surface: Lightly Textured Matte

That's it!! What's going on with the short description block??

~Kim

So I've looked in the schema for the product as defined in the SQL table and the short description is supposed to be a varchar(1000). I'm assuming this should support a 1000 characters.

What I've noticed is the short description when viewing the product list inside store manager isn't printing all the information in the short description. If I exit store manager and go to the shop and look at the same product listing the information is there. But now I'm seeing in the two products I have listed a completely different look for the "Learn more" button. I have a screen shot of this that I've uploaded. Why is the button different for the two different products?

Could you please get back to me about the problems with the short description block, why the buttons look different and why the short description shows properly in the store but not the store manager?

Thanks

~Kim

We don't truncate the short description on the front end catalog page, but we do truncate it on the admin product results page. If you want to remove that limitation, you can change this line of code:

<?php echo substr(strip_tags($ProductShortDesc), 0 , 53); ?>

in the admin/products_results.php to:

<?php echo strip_tags($ProductShortDesc); ?>

In regard to the learn more button, can you please post a link to the page. It might have to do with the short description missing an end tag.

It somehow corrected itself last night. Would have been nice to know that the short description was truncated inside admin panel. I thought I was going CRAZY! In the end after spending an inordinate amount of time changing and testing on both sides of the admin interface I realized that what an end user sees looks correct. It's just doing the weird stuff in the admin interface as you stated.

Don't know what happen with the button. It appears to be working now. Just that one instance during my fit of confusion that it appeared and I grabbed a screen shot of it so I could explain.

think this has been cleared up now...at least I hope! I'll look at the code and possible extend the field you pointed to so I don't notice the discrepancy between the real interface and the admin interface. Thanks for the pointers!!

~Kim