The task at our agency for an online store based on Magento 1 CE 1.9 is to display the product description (which is very short!) below the product number in the order overview of the order confirmation email. The correct place to make these changes is the following file:
app\design\frontend\YOUR_PACKAGE\YOUR_THEME\template\email\order\items\order\default.phtml
(see also https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/116064/how-can-i-include-product-description-in-magento-order-email). Here, you can add the description below the product number / SKU, for example. In principle, Magento should already support this with the following line:
echo $this->escapeHtml($_item->getDescription());
But only in principle. The output here is simply NULL.
So we replace the line with:
$_description = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
->load($_item->getProductId())
->getDescription();
?>
<p style="margin:-1px 0 0 0">
<?php // echo $this->escapeHtml($_item->getDescription())
echo $this->escapeHtml($_description);
?>
</p>
(see also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10900548/magento-email-template-item-getdescription-returns-null), and everything works as expected! Tested at our web agency with an online store built using Magento CE 1.9.2.3.
