How do I change the length of the description on the featured products module.

If you find the default description displayed is too long at 130 characters. You can modify the smarty code on the template (tpl) file. All you need to do is (via FTP) go to modules/homefeatured, open the tpl file, find this line:

{$product.description_short|strip_tags:htmlall:'UTF-8'|truncate:130}

and simply change 130 to something smaller, say 90 and that's it, the description on each product displayed in this module is now 90 characters long - no risk of you creating any syntax errors in php.