Just a follow-up to this posting. The following code does work, just make sure you are careful where in the "meta.tpl" you are placing this code. There are plenty of "if" statements in "meta.tpl". Make sure you don't get your code nested inside another "if" statement.

{if $main eq "product"}
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="{$product.product}">
{else}
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Your normal meta description here">
{/if}

Save yourself some problems go to the link below and you will get this mod for free.

It works great I have implemented on my site

http://bcsengineering.com/store/catalog/Product_Meta_Tags__FREE_Xcart_Mod-p-88.html

Please give Carrie some big Kuddos on this one.

I hope this will help

Kind regards,
Ricky

Yeah i've gone with Carries @ BCSE as well and it works great

I wish it were that easy. Some of my 100,000 products don't have descriptions so I needed to add a few iterations to check each piece of data. It works really well. Good news is, this is only a smarty mod, no new PHP needed. Bad news - I have to rerun my 100,000 product catalog. I have a cron script to run the catalog however.

I looked at the link...I think I'll buy a few of the other mods!

You could do this in a matter of seconds using CVS by simply copying and dropping the information into the correct tables.

I also have a paid version now that combines the free mod features with being able to use extra fields to add keywords meta tags and description meta tags. If there's no data in the extra fields for keywords and/or description then it will auto generate keywords and/or description for you with data from the product. So the paid one may work better for you since you don't have descriptions for most of your products. You can find it here:
http://www.bcsengineering.com/store/customer/product.php?productid=95&MMCF_xf_pmt

Hope that helps!

Carrie