Shopping cart for courses

Hi

I'm new to Hikashop, but I'm very impressed so far. However, my current project needs a shopping cart for courses and I'm struggling.

The format needs to be in the form of a reletively static number of courses (20 or so), most of which will run several times a year. Booking for individual course dates will need to end automatically.

At the moment I seem to be able to get mostly there by using the generic courses as products and the dates as varients. However, by default an end date can't be set for a varient, and I wondered if there mght be a way around this.

As a further complication the procedure is for a deposit to be taken for these courses prior to 4 weeks beforehand, with the full amount due within 4 weeks of the course date. This is not critical in itself, however, the effect of placing a deposit amount as the price, with the full price in the page text is that the deposit price shows up in all the product summary boxes within modules and product category.

I would also like the intro read more text to show on the product category page, which looks to be an option that I can't seem to get working.

Any help on these points would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks