the main shop page displays the full item description. with shops having a lot of inventory and / or lengthy descriptions, this could make browsing cumbersome and turn away shoppers. 

it would be ideal if a shop owner could create a short description which is displayed on the contents page, then click more information for the full description. some of this might be addressable by style sheets or xsd which extracted the first n words of the description on the main page with a link to follow to full description page.

 not being an expert at the mechanics of implementing this, i would prefer a built in capability to provide this functionality...

I think what your asking for has already been catered for and because of the flexibilty of the chameleon controls is possible with the current version.  I just want to make sure I understand your question correctly first, before replying.

Is what your asking for, that on the ItemDescription page i.e. "<productName>.aspx" you would like to display a short description and then when a user clicks on the expand the text so they can read more information about the product? 

If that is the case then you can create a custom CS theme to achieve this, or you can alter the default theme in one of several ways.

1. The ItemData control has a property on it called excerpt, this returns a shortend version of description without any html formating (as used on the category browse page)
2. If you would like to include HTML formating in both short and long desciptions then you could always use the Editorial Review text as secondary content.
3. You could add all of your content in the description along with some javascript to allow you to display either the short or long version of the text, depending on user interaction.

To compliment some of these senarios you could also introduce a completely new page using the SiteUrls.Config and redirect to that to display the extra information.

The CS theme's are really powerfull and basically the shop can be configured in any way you can imagine, this also includes the payment gateways giving you the power to have completely custom user experience on a shop by shop basis.  The default theme that we provide is one which we hope to be most generic for everyones needs, however we welcome anyone who wants to share or sell addon themes or event modules.  

Regards
Rob  

the page in question displaying the entire desciption is /shops/shop/default.aspx.....maybe the same principle as what you described above applies to providing a solution.....<productName>.aspx is the appropriate page to display all of the detail...default.aspx is not - it gets too busy and does not display well - hence the need for an excerpt or a short description as opposed to a long description...

 actually the only thing which i would want to display on the default page in the grid is an image, product title, price, link to detailed information, and add to cart....all with little to no programming...

I understand now and I will try and explain what you need to do to make the changes required.

The changes can be done without programing however you will need to learn how to alter the chameleon controls on the pages to make your changes (This is the same in Community Server if you wanted to customize the forum, blog or file pages and Telligent have produced a book) 

The reason that these sorts of display options are not hardcoded into the control panel is because this would restrict the UI and reduce the capability of the product to be as flexible as possible. For instance a customer may not require a home page at all.  The idea being is that a theme should be created for you particular instance and customized appropriately for its use.

If you are making minor changes then there is a control panel page that allows you to alter the CSS that is used when rendering the shop pages.

I think the best option that may be we can expand our set of default themes to cover a set of common senarios, for instance we have a customer that requires a single page for payment and billing address information, this is not in the current theme, however it could be that others will require a simplar bit of functionality.

I hope I have clarrified things,
Rob

okay...you gave me a programming answer to a design issue....so let's separate them......i still think that there is a need for a short description separate from the long description because i may want to present different information on the home page listing than i do in the detailed listing....whether you care to support it or not is a differnt matter....providing an excerpt of the description is a work around which does not meet the need namely because i would always have to structure my description to fit this work around (tight coupling). as a product management decision, you may determine that there is not enough demand to support it....which in turn leads me to the programming part....

i have decided that i do not want to excerpt....instead i want to display an image, a product name or title, price, and the action buttons one of which brings me to the detailed description...and....i want each column header labeled.....so i could pay you to make the change or pay you to tell me how to implement the change....or....you could provide specific guidance free as part of evaluation :D.....

 the reason i ask that way is that i do not know if i need to change database values, xml, aspx pages, css pages, or some combination of the foregoing and more importantly precisely which page, file, etc etc...and for this type of change i do not want to read any chameleon documentation : )....with a limited evaluation period, i need to focus on the product rather than other peripheral subjects.

I will happily provide guidance after you purchase the product and if you want our company to then would be happy to provide you with a quotation for the customizations, which I think are quite straight forward.

Regards,
Rob