Limiting content for New Product & Best Sellers

[badders]

Is it possible to limit the amount of text being displayed in the New Products and Best Sellers listings?

It looks to me like the body text is taking everything from the "Full Description" field for the product. But I have a lot of products that need fairly lengthy descriptions. So if for example I have three Best Sellers on the Home page, all three will be in the same size box, with some having a lot of empty white space with others having far to much in the description text. I managed a workaround in that the full description is a line or two, then I add a fragment under the product for the full description.

Is there a more elegant way to achive this?

Thanks,

Andrew Baddeley
Head of Immersive
NMI Security plc

[jont]

Is that not detailed in the Advanced User Guide?

[Jan]

It is I am sure, Zoltan's groovy description shortener or something like that, it shows the first 8 or 10 characters followed by ... if they are to long, looks good.

Regards,

[badders]

ah ha! Page 16 of the Advanced User Guide....

[Faulkds]

Which user guide?

Im using version 9 and cant find this fix

[malbro]

Which user guide?

Im using version 9 and cant find this fix

Try V8.13

Here is the info:

Only Displaying the First Ten Words of the Full Description
It is possible to include a PHP statement which only displays the first 10 words of the full description in the store pages. This is useful if you are displaying a compact version of the product, and don't want the full description to appear.
Simply click on the product description (in the 'Design' tab) that you want to shorten.
Then locate the 'ProductDescription' variable in the layout code.
Highlight that variable and replace it with the following code:

<actinic:block php="true" >
$sShort = "";
$nCount = 0;
$sOriginal = '<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductDescription" selectable="false" />'; 
foreach(explode(" ", $sOriginal) as $sWord)
	{
   if ($nCount > 10)
   	{
   	$sShort .= "...";
   	break;
   	}
   $sShort .= $sWord . " ";
   $nCount++;
   }
echo $sShort;
</actinic:block>

[Buzby]

Is it possible to do this with character length instead of word length?

Searching I can only find posts on word length.

[NormanRouxel]

Just counting characters is a lot simpler.

<actinic:block php="true" >
	$sOriginal = '<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductDescription" selectable="false" />';
	$sShort = substr('<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductDescription" selectable="false" />', 0, 123);
	echo $sShort;
	if ( $sShort != $sOriginal ) echo '...';  
</actinic:block>

Replacing the 123 with the number of characters you require.

[Buzby]

Many thanks Norman, it worked just as I wanted it to.

[IanSheard]

Hi Guys,

We are having the same issue with our web site.

On our home page we show text below the section photos and for some reason the amount of text stops at different levels, and the text space actually shortens if we try to edit to size.

We would like to set the more info button to the bottom of the text box and allow the text to populate to the bottom on the line above the “more info” button.


I have found this code within our website, but when I change it. It doesn't seem to change on the website.

Can any one help!

Link to Website:
http://www.livinghouse.co.uk/

Cheers,
Ian

[Buzby]

Hi Ian,

I didn't actually use the code for New products and best sellers as the thread says.

I wanted to use it on some pages to auto generate Page Titles and Meta Descriptions so that when generated I could control the length to avoid any Google penalty.

My code using Norman's above, would look like this.

echo substr('<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductReference" selectable="false" /> | <actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductName" selectable="false" /> | <actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="JewelleryItem" selectable="false" /> by <actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="brand" selectable="false" /> and made of <actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="Material (Main Material)" selectable="false" /> <actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="Material (2nd Material)" selectable="false" />', 0, 150) . '...';

[IanSheard]

This is the code that we currently have on our home page:

<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionDescription%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22%22" >
						<actinic:block php="true" >
							$sShort = "";
							$nCount = 0;
							$sDesc = '<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="sProdDescription" selectable="false" />';
							if ($sDesc == '') {
								$sOriginal = '<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductDescription" selectable="false" />';
							}
							else {
								$sOriginal = $sDesc;
							}
							$sNoTabs = preg_replace("~({tab\s\").*?(})~msi", "", $sOriginal);
							$sNoApos = preg_replace("/[^!.%,a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "", strip_tags($sNoTabs));
							$sNoTags = str_replace("!!<", "", $sNoTabs);
							$sNoTags = str_replace(">!!", "", $sNoTags);
							foreach(explode(" ", $sNoTags) as $sWord)
								{
								if ($nCount > 90)
									{
									$sShort .= "...";
									break;
									}
								$sShort .= $sWord . " ";
								$nCount++;
								}
							echo $sShort;
						</actinic:block>
					</actinic:block>
					<br/><br/>
					<a class="ic_link" title="<actinic:variable encoding="perl" name="ProductName" selectable="false" />" href="<actinic:variable name="ProductPageName" />">More Info ></a>
			</p>
		</div>
    </div>
    <div style="clear:both;"></div>
</div>

Hope can help with solving the issue.

Thanks