How to set default value to magento short description?

Question

Currently my store has around 20000+ products. And each product's short description section contains product title at this moment.

I want to replace every product's short description section with following image instead of product title.

How to bulk replace above image code to magento product Short description section?

Answer 1

You could try setting a default value for the short_description attribute, from the admin panel go to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes. However, you would need to remove all the values set for the existing products. I would do this with a tool called magmi mass importer.

Perhaps a better approach would be to remove the short description from the product view page and create a static block with your content and add this to the product view page.

For this method you first need to create a static block with your content, next add it to your layout xml, you need to find out the layout handle for your product view page, probably either PRODUCT_TYPE_configurable or PRODUCT_TYPE_simple or both? Then use the unset_child action method to remove the short description or you may need to just comment it out from your theme's catalog/product/view.phtml template file if it is not added by layout xml. Then make your recently created static block available to your product page with something like.

<block type="cms/block" name="my_identifier"> <action method="setBlockId"><block_id >my_identifier</block_id></action> </block> 

Finally to add your static block to your product pages use the below code snippet in your phtml template file, next to where the short description was being called.

<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('my_identifier') ?>

I think the second method is best as your content is not a short description of the product but rather useful information about your store and as such this data should not be held in the 'short_description' attribute which may be used elsewhere in the system, I.e. shopping cart, transactional emails etc.

Good luck

Answer 2

Be sure to make a backup of your SQL DB first.

Your task could be done by altering Magento's SQL DB directly.

Since Magento uses the EAV (entity-attribute-value) data model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model), you first need to find out which attribute ID your Magento uses to set the corresponding values.

Open your Magento DB with phpMyAdmin or something similar. Check your domain/hosting management tool to get access to it.

Open the table eav_attribute and search for short_description inside the column attribute_code. You can use the search of your SQL management tool or simply run the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM `eav_attribute` WHERE `attribute_code` = "short_description";

Note the attribute_id from the resulting row.

Now open the table catalog_product_entity_text which holds the text inside the product's short description. Do a search for where attribute_id is your noted id (number), like (in this case 62):

SELECT * FROM `catalog_product_entity_text` WHERE `attribute_id` = 62;

In the column value you'll find the product's short description.

Now you can alter all value fields by using this SQL query:

UPDATE `catalog_product_entity_text`
SET `value` = '<img src="http://domain.com/images/conditions.gif" />'
WHERE `attribute_id` = 62;

If you're using different storeViews (maybe as languages) notice that the column store_id also plays a role.

Be sure to make a backup of your SQL DB first.