Hundreds of ecommerce systems exist, but very few can match the power of Magento. In this screencast, I'll demonstrate how to download and install Magento to a local host, configure some of the site options, and create simple and configurable products and categories for our test e-commerce site.
Screencast
Why Use Magento?
Well there are quite a few very good reasons to use Magento:
- A Simple Intuitive Interface
- Easy To Download, Install & Maintain
- Built on current technologies unlike other systems.
- Multiple Site Functionality
- And best of all...It's free and open source!
Preparation
As with all successful things in life, preparation is key! Before we can install Magento we must set up a database on our server. Using phpmyadmin we create a new database called "magento". We will use this later when we come to install Magento.
Downloading/Installing Magento
Once our database has been set up on our server the next step is to download Magento itself. To do that we need to go to the download page on the Magento website. For this tutorial we will be downloading the Full Release in ZIP format. Once you have it downloaded unzip it to the folder of your choice.
Now that we have the files on our server it’s time to install Magento, to do this we go to http://localhost/magento (or whichever folder your using) in your web browser.
Accept the TOC's and continue onto the next page.
Pick the settings that apply to you and click continue.
Going well so far...Now fill in the database connection settings. Make sure that you hit Use Web Server (Apache) Rewrites for added SEO friendliness and if you want to change the default access address for your backend from /admin edit the Admin Path field.
Fill in the login details you'd like to use for your account and enter an custom encryption key if you like, otherwise leave it blank and Magento will make one for you.
Great, now Magento has been installed on your server, if you have installed locally there is one last step you need to take before you can login...
In your Magento folder go to app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php
Find the session_set_cookie_params code block (Line 78) and replace it with this code:
session_set_cookie_params(
$this->getCookie()->getLifetime(),
$this->getCookie()->getPath()
//$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),
//$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),
//$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()
);
On a proper webhost you do not need to do this! However as we are working on localhost we need to do this to address an cookie issue.
Tax Rules
To set up our different levels of tax we need to go to the Manage Tax Zones & Rates tab under Sales » Tax. If the rule for your state doesn't exist or has been changed recently then hit the "Add New Tax Rate".
Save your new tax rule and you are good to go!
Categories
To create a new category we need to go to the Catalog tab on the navigation and select Manage Categories. From there we can manage and add new categories.
To create our new category we need to click Add Subcategory and fill in the details like the picture below, making sure to change Is Active to Yes.
Products
Products are key to a site but in Magento there was multiple product types as shown below...To create a new product we need to Catalog tab on the navigation and select Manage Products. And finally click Add Product
Simple Products
These are the products that have no options, such as DVD. To create our Simple product select Default for the attribute set and Simple Product for the Product Type and click Continue.
General Tab
- Name: The name of our new product
- Description: The main body description of the product; the place to really sell the product and all of its features!
- Short Description: The quick overview that appears just below the price on the product page; the place to grab the attention of buyers
- SKU: The stock code for the product
- Weight: The weight of the product. This can be kilos, tonnes or whatever you want as long as you keep uniformity across all your products
- Manufacturer: Blank by default but manufacturers can be added through the Manage Attributes Tab.
- Colour: Blank by default but again like the manufactures can be added through the Manage Attributes Tab
- Set Product As New From Date: Sets the product to new from the date you enter.
- Set Product as New to Date: Sets when the product ends being new.
- Status: If the product is Enabled and showing on the website or if it's disabled.
- URL key: The custom option for how the URL for your product is written.
- Visibility: Where the product can be found by your visitors;
- Nowhere: The product does not appear on the website.
- Catalog: The product will appear on the website but not in search results.
- Search: The product will not appear on the website but will appear in search results.
- Catalog, Search: The product will appear on the website and in search results.
- Allow Gift Message:
- Yes: Allows a gift message
- No: Doesn't allow a gift message
- Config: Use the site's configuration
Price Tab
- Price: The price of our product
- Special Price: Offers on products for limited times.
- Special Price From Date: The date in which the special price starts.
- Special Price To Date: The date in which the special price ends.
- Cost: The cost of the product.
- Tax Class: If your product requires Tax added then Taxable Goods must be selected.
- Tier Price: Allows for bulk discounts to be set up. Click Add Tier to add quantity discounts.
- Google Checkout: Can visitors buy this product using Google Checkout.
Meta Information Tab
- Meta Title: Information that appears in the <title> tag.
- Meta Keywords: keywords that apply to your product.
- Meta Description: A short description of your product that appears on Search Engine Result Pages.
Images Tab
Images are a key part of your product and the better quality you can get the more chance you have of making a sale, Magento allows for multiple images to be uploaded and specific images to be uploaded for the Base Image, the Small Image and the Thumbnail, as well as allowing for a label. If you want to remove an image simply click the Exclude to hide or the Remove to delete checkbox(s).
- Base Image: The main image that appears on the product page.
- Small Image: The image that appears in the categories/search view.
- Thumbnail: The thumbnail of the product.
Design Tab
Unless you are using a template for your Magento store it's best to give this one a miss, but for anyone who is curious the Design tab allows you to use themes that you have set up and allows you to choose active to and from dates as well as changing the page layout into different column blocks and so on.
Inventory Tab
- Manage Stock: If you'd like to track and manage stock levels then leave this set to Yes
- Qty: The amount of product you have.
- Stock Availability: If the product is in stock or not. Setting this to Out of Stock will not hide the product on the website!
The other options are best left to the site configuration however are all pretty self explanatory if you wish to set them to your needs.
Categories Tab
Your product can appear in multiple categories; simply click the checkbox of the category you want it to appear in!
Related Products / Up-sells / Cross-sells
With related products, up-sells and cross-sells the interface to add is same, to add a product simply select a field you wish to search by and click the search button, a list of products matching your criteria will appear. Click the checkbox next to the product and it will appear as a related product/up-sell or cross-sell as applicable.
Product Reviews / Product Tags / Customers Tagged Product
These are all added by users and can viewed from the tabs.
Custom Options
These are custom options that you can add to your product. To add a custom option click Add New Option and fill in the details.
Managing Attributes & Attribute Sets
Attributes are the options that make up your products, for example colour, weight and so on. Attribute sets are sets of attributes that make a whole product and allow us to make configurable products.
Attributes
To create a new attribute/view our current attributes we need to go to the Catalog tab on the navigation and select Attributes and then Manage Attributes. To view a attribute simply click on the row, to create a new attribute click the Add New Attribute Tab.
Properties Tab
It's best to use an convention when you are naming your attributes, as your list grows it will make it easier to find what you are looking for. I like to use options_option_product which for this product would be options_colour_nettuts_shirt. We must set our scope to global and Catalog Input Type to Dropdown in order to create our configurable product(s). We are only applying our Attribute to Simple Products and Configurable Products. In order to use this attribute in our configurable products we must choose Yes on the Use To Create Configurable Product field. We must also select Yes on the Visible on Product View Page on Front-end field in order to make the attribute visible.
Manage Label / Options Tab
Next we need to set up the options for our user to select from when choosing there product. In our example we are using Colour as our product option.
The title is what the visitor will see above the dropdown, with Magento we can define what the admin sees and what the user sees making it easier to track options with additional information, in the example we have called our Title, Colour. If we leave the Default Store View blank it will copy what we have entered into Admin.
To add the options for our product click the Add Option button for the number of options you require, in our example 3. Like the title if we leave the Default Store View blank it will copy what we have entered into Admin but we can use the Admin field to add more information, making it easy to fulfill orders for example. We use position to order our options and the Is Default radio box to define which option is default. We can easily delete any option using the button to the right. Once we have all the options we want click Save to return to the attributes page.
Attribute Sets
Next we need to set up our Attribute Set in order to create our configurable product. We navigate to the Catalog tab on the navigation and select Attributes and then Manage Attribute Sets. Like the Attributes page we have a list of our Current Attribute Sets; Default should only be appearing. Click Add New Set.
Again like our Attribute we should use a convention to name our Attribute Set...so matching our Attribute; options_size_tshirts. Since we have no other Sets we are going to base the new one on Default.
To include our Attribute into our Set we simply need to click and drop it into the General group from the right hand list. Click save and our set is complete. Going well so far...
Creating A Configurable Product
Creating a configurable product is very similar to creating a Simple Product. To start we create a new product. But we need to change the Attribute Set to the one we just created and the product type to Configurable Product and click continue.
Next we need to pick the Attributes we would like to use in our product. Only attributes with a scope of Global, type of dropdown and the option to create a configurable product set to yes can be used.
The only tabs that change are the Inventory tab and an new tab has been added called Associated Products which is where we will add our options. Once we have filled in all our details we need to save and continue edit before we can begin to add our Associated Products. Unlike some other ecommerce systems Magento creates simple products that are hidden in order to create a configurable product.
To create the options we are going to use the "Quick simple product creation" tool to make our Simple Product options. For the name and SKU fields you can let Magento auto generate these but for added control I suggest that you fill these in yourself. In the example we are creating a green shirt option. We have filled in the Name, SKU, Weight and have set the product to Enabled. However we must set the visibility of our product to nowhere. From the drop-down we select the attribute option we are creating for and set the price. For the default option we don't enter a value and it will use the price we set on our configurable product but for the other options we enter the difference between the configurable product and the option. So if the Green top is $15 and our configurable product is $20 then we have to enter -5.00 as our price. We then need to set the Qty for the option and the Stock Availability to In Stock and click Quick Create. We repeat this process until we have added all of our options and click save. Our configurable product is now complete. If we view our products page we can see that Magento has created the options as simple products for us that have been hidden. Making tracking stock much easier!
Congratulations
Well done, you have just downloaded and installed Magento to your localhost, you have created a simple product, a custom attribute and attribute set, a configurable product using your custom attribute and a category. I hope that you have learned some of the basics of Magento and I wish you all the best during your endeavors. If you have any questions please leave a comment below and i'll try my best to help you out!
If you a real go getter and would like to get into some of the more advanced topics or would like to learn more than I suggest that you check out the Knowledge Base on the Magento website as well as Designers Guide if you’re interested in customizing Magento more.
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Myfacefriends July 2nd
nice tuts! thanks!
( )B July 2nd
I tried it about a year ago and it was so slow. it was very code heavy before the page even rendered. any recent improvements on this?
( )Zy July 2nd
Hmm they are trying to do something, but I use recent version and I can confirm, that without dedicated hardware magento runs comparably slow. This is because it used to do a lot of XML processing somehow, or at least that I and my friend managed to research.
In short, custom development with magento is very far from perfect. For example this tutorial does not cover how to modify layouts or how to use blocks system. Building default store with magento is easy, but try to customize it and then you will understand why magento development services aren’t so cheap
Good luck.
( )Daniel July 2nd
I can also confirm. And right when I was in the middle of making a store they changed the way support works. The FREE version has ZERO support now. And I’ not about to pay almost 9 Grand for a cart with so many problems. I was willing to give it a chance but once they killed support I scrapped it and went elsewhere.
Alfred July 11th
time to try PRESTASHOP… light and fast and easy to mod
Octavio Corral July 2nd
thats the one drawback of Magento. it is incredibly slow. Even on the fastest servers. The last thing you want your customers feeling is frustration because the store takes too long to load between pages.
( )NaRzY July 2nd
Nice Tutorial!
( )Emmanuel Medina July 2nd
Great I just starting a new project with this tool very helpful !
( )Kevin Urrutia July 2nd
nice thanks
( )Sam G. Daniel July 2nd
Great tutorial. How does Magento compare with Zen Cart. One of the reasons I shied away from Magento was performance. I find Zen Cart ok but there is a lot that you need to do to get it off the ground.
( )Michael Thompson July 6th
Until they release the new version (2.0 — due soon), do not deploy with Zen Cart. I’ve had two client installations get hacked.
As far as adding/maintaining product, Magento wins. And they’re both a bit of a mess to build templates for.
( )Michael Thompson July 6th
And to clarify, the “hacked” sites were due to ZC vulnerabilities. If you do run with ZC or have installations deployed currently make certain you’re keeping up-to-date with security news and patches.
Alex July 2nd
What else do you guys recommend? I need a lightweight, easy to customize/design solution for a small online shop.
Thanks,
( )Alex
Daniel July 3rd
Have you had a look at Shopify? It’s hosted but def easy to customize
( )Nahid July 28th
How about Prestashop which alfred suggested? Heard about shopify but never tried it!
Ruslan July 2nd
Oh My God
Finally a good Magento tutorial.
Thank you SOOOO much
( )Nick July 2nd
I have run into a lot of trouble customizing magento themes. It has also crashed many times. My client/friend wants to be up and running soon, but things just havent gone too smoothly. Any suggestions on other free carts?
( )Josh July 2nd
Yeah, the template system and performance issues turned me off Magento. I’m a happy user of PrestaShop now: http://www.prestashop.com
( )Nic July 2nd
I’m a Magento integration specialist, and some of the above concerns about speed and reliability are pretty well-based. There’s a myriad of common problems, and even community support is getting scarce
( )Brian Temecula July 8th
Having never used Magento, your comment above all others (because you are a specialist) seems to really make using Magento seem unrealistic. The video had me really believing that Magento was awesome, especially considering that my only experience with a pre-built shopping cart is osCommerce, and osCommerce is terrible to work with IMHO.
So what e-commerce solution do you recommend?
( )lawrence77 July 2nd
good one….
( )I’m happy with nettuts….
Nahid July 28th
quite happy I can see!
( )Christopher Masiello July 2nd
I feel totally mislead. I thought that this was going to be about Easy E and how to sell his stuff. Not E-Commerce.
( )Just kidding, good tutorial.
John Shaw July 2nd
As someone who is STILL learning every nuance about Magento, I can honestly say that the headaches sometimes do not feel worth it. The biggest was probably figuring out the design-side of things. But then we ran into issues with formatting the email templates, the store being slow, emails not being sent or received, and a whole slew of other issues. Also, it seems that if you get the free version and can’t spring for the support package, if you post on the forums for a solution to a problem, it’s rare for anyone from the Varien team to respond.
( )All in all, I like the feature set of Magento, but the overhead just simply outweighs everything else. I wish I had convinced the client better to stay with our previous cart software.
Maz July 2nd
For 10 years we work as open-source implementator and costultant company, It was nice to see the Magento BOOM, BUT!
1. Magento is very-very slow!
2. It has some ‘insane’ PHP code inside that make it hard to customize and upadte!
3. Almost every update makes the API different what makes your customized SHOP stop running and Plugin-In development expensive and impossible to maintain.
4. I think the point of magento developers is to SELL YOU the Tehnical support Package that cost 8.000 USD per year!
Monthly We have about 20 clients that want to install/customize and use Magento, they always step off later…. Yes it is really simple and nice to install, and run, but realize that you will depend on this system for long time! As I said, I think the only point is to Crush your existing shop, make your depend on magento and then sell your the X.000 USD technical support package!
Try magento but think before getting depend on it! Also Try other open-source carts!
( )Alex December 15th
And remember, the paid package doesn’t include development support!!!
Magento is one big headache!
( )Neilio July 2nd
I’ve also been looking into Magento recently. The features do seem to be amazing but I’m getting the impression that it’s almost too powerful, meaning slow performance and an incredible learning curve. It would probably be spot on for a huge business but for a small business that wants to be up and running quickly, with a responsive ecommerce site, I’m trying to check out other options.
When I checked out Magento’s installation process (only a couple of weeks ago), it said you also had to set up a cron job and the instructions for that seemed a bit ambiguous. However, if it’s as easy as this tut suggests, I might give it a whirl.
( )Michael Thompson July 6th
De facto Magento installation, summarized:
1. Create database.
( )2. Copy files.
3. Load yoursite.com/shop/ in a browser.
4. Fill out a few text boxes.
Jason Judge February 2nd
I wouldn’t say it was *too* powerful. What I will say is that the features that make it look so great don’t actually work. I am having a nightmare with promotions and tax – it simply calculates the tax wrongly, by applying the discounts *after* the tax on the pre-discount amount is calculated, and there is no fix.
So – what is the use of all these so-called features if they cannot actually be used?
There is no community support. There is just a release of code from a year ago, and that’s it. No bugs being responded to, no ability to push fixes back to the project, no-body reading the forums. A year ago it looked great; now I would say stay *well clear* of Magento. It will eat your time and your sanity.
( )Shawn Imbeault July 2nd
How easy is it to add Magento functionality to a customized front end? You mentioned you’d be covering other things in the future, is this one of them?
( )JohnW July 2nd
Excellent intro to Magento! I have been interested in finding out more about the software and this helped a lot. Do you have any information about what type of reports Magento can output? The biggest question I have had is whether or not Magento can interact with Peachtree by Sage. Most of the solutions I have seen are expensive integrations, so the search continues. Thanks for the good work.
( )Alex P July 2nd
Nice tutorial. Love it! Any chance of a tutorial about development in Magento any time soon? Like creating templates, plugins etc..?
( )Eric Boyer July 2nd
Oh good. I thought I already read this tutorial…
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/getting-started-with-magento-ecommerce/
It even has the same picture!
Lets move on past downloading and installing PHP applications… and get into the dirty work.
( )Michael Thompson July 6th
Agreed, though I thought I’d read this article before here:
( )http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/magento_installation_guide
Diogo Galvão July 2nd
Great tutorial!
I never give it a real try but playing around with it for a while I can confirm it’s quite enterprise slow.
Quoting one of their old release notes:
“Removed unnecessary queries from catalog pages and homepage (e.g. reduced total number of database queries from 700 to 60 for homepage, and from 500 to 100 on product listing page on a database of 1000 products and 300 categories).”
Even with this improvement you can see it’s a simple application. But I suppose that’s what you got for such a customizable solution.
And it’s worth pointing that one should definitely use a PHP opcode cache such as APC given that one request uses hundreds of PHP classes.
( )Jason Barone July 2nd
Magento looks high quality but when I tested it out, the code was VERY heavy, pages loaded slow, and it was very complicated to do simple theme changes. Support was hard to find as well. Maybe in the future I’ll give it a shot again…
( )NetChaos July 2nd
The new version of OsCommerce is based on Kohana framework and it is named QuantumOs
( )Brian Temecula July 8th
Where can this be found? I searched around for “QuantumOs” online and found nothing.
( )NetChaos July 18th
Hi Brian,
They haven’t yet started working on it, still in planing stage. If you are wondering from where I got the news, there was a discussion about it at the Kohana forum as they are planing to use Kohana framework for the new QuantumOS.
Trev July 2nd
I agree with the above comments from Jason, etc.
Magento is a beast! There’s probably entire operating systems + software that have a smaller code-base. It’s so slow on all but the fastest of dedicated servers, and even then it’s only “ok”. It’s way too bloated. The admin-side does everything you could ever want and then some, but is also incredibly complicated for clients to use. Feature-bloat, code-bloat, a pain to customise and theme… avoid.
A good alternative is Spree (no affiliation, it’s just decent): http://spreecommerce.com/
Satchmo (strange name) also looks very promising:
http://www.satchmoproject.com/
Also, Shopify seems to still be the best hosted solution.
( )Wee Chuan July 2nd
I like Magento, can do everything I want on e-commerce. But like said by many, it hogs resources. So not really can be used if on shared hosting. Do you know any good plugins for Wordpress instead that do proper e-commerce but not full-blown as Magento? TQ.
( )Moe July 2nd
I’ve just finished working with Magento on a small project.
It’s one of the hardest to customize carts I’ve ever worked with. Making minor changes to the layout can sometimes take a large amount of research and effort just to execute.
Support is severely lacking (have to pay for basic documentation) and is frequently outdated. The only real support is available from the members on the forum.
It’s quite clunky and slow and things often don’t run how you expect them to.
They lure you in with their great looking site, but anybody who spends too much time trying to explain it is likely to get lost forever down the rabbit hole.
( )Owen July 2nd
Don’t worry about the slow computer, man! Thanks for helping everyone out. We’re a company looking to use Magento for a few upcoming projects, and your screencast helps enormously.
( )Muhammad Adnan July 2nd
i prefer the oscommerce rather than any other OpenSource e-commerce Solution.
for wordpress , use wp-e-commerce plugin . i have used it . easy to customize and manage.
( )devx July 2nd
Oscommerce! Are you serious!? Its way too outdated. I really like Magento, but its quite chellenging to configure if you don’t have any programming experience. Prestashop also looks really promising, and its more easier to configure compared to Magento.
( )Karl July 2nd
Sorry to say but Magento is mainly the product around the script to me (not to play the effort down of course).
( )Also, I agree with the consensus in the comments, Magento is slow as hell and a headache to work with. It totally reminds me to the Gallery 2 script when it finally was released, in terms of performance etc. Thankfully I came across Zenphoto.org
Still looking for a script that approaches a shopping cart the way Zenphoto approaches image gallerys. Simple and to the point yet very productive.
Mike July 2nd
I prefer Drupal’ s Ubercart…works well and is easy to customize but lacks the slick backend that Magento offers…
( )Hasanga July 2nd
Magento is good script. However it’s slow with shared hosting.
My best choice for e-commerce, Joomla + VirtueMart!
Fast!!, Easy to customize, Optimized, Huge Community support and lots and lots of plug-ins available.
Nice tut anyway!
Regards!
( )Furley July 2nd
yay magento! such a nice ecommerce system.
( )joe July 2nd
if you’re rolling wordpress, grab the Shopp plugin. it’s very segzy!
( )fokusininkas July 3rd
Almost everyone complains about it, but also everyone uses it
Thats because the alternatives are weak.. but i must agree – Magento needs a good server, nowadays its not a big problem i think..
( )Riko Kwe July 3rd
I’ve tried Magento about 2 months ago. I agree that the application is way too heavy. The admin panel is really slow.
In order to add 1 product, you have to go through lots of steps, which is good. But the downside is time. It is taking way too much time. Not very efficient. Not to mention, the longer you work on the admin panel, the more memory your browser will consume.
If your store is not selling many products to sell, I will strongly advise not to use Magento. You will sacrifice your loading time over the features, unless you’re ok with that.
In e-commerce, every second of loading time counts. If your e-store takes longer than 5 seconds to load, there is high chance your customer will go to other e-store.
Better do more research before getting into decision to use Magento
( )ricochet July 3rd
Finally we have an open-source eCommerce company/community that understands the importance of providing a positive user experience for both the front-end and back-end users! The performance issues will be resolved in future releases, and the naysayers will have to move on to another application!
Thanks Ed!
( )Clément July 3rd
I can suggest you Prestashop (http://prestashop.com/) fast and awesome !
There is a lot of plugins !
I’ve tryed Magento, very powerful but slow … :’(
thanks for this tuts
( )Andris July 3rd
That was a pretty informative screencast. next time I have to set up a shop, I’ll definetly use Magento.
( )Jerichvc July 3rd
Yes. I tried using magento to both production and localhost servers and its slow. For me, magento is good for large ecommerce sites, but its a heavyweight for simple ecommerce sites to use.
Also, it would be great to follow this tutorial with a screencast of customizing theme. Because if we dig in to its files, there is a lot of it to customize.
It would be a wise decision to use magento with their future release bec. i believe it will load fast and easy to customize and play.
( )Benjamin Reid July 3rd
De ja vu? Has this not been on here before?
( )maria July 3rd
An excellent resource on magento. well done!
( )reece July 3rd
thanks been needing help with magento for awhile
( )Simbioziz July 3rd
Its so good and so easy! Thanks
( )Wery interest tuts.
Nick July 3rd
A tutorial on customizing themes would be great.
( )sule July 3rd
very nice and helpfull! thanks a lot
( )awake July 3rd
nice tutorial…
more and more I’m feeling like nettuts tutorials are more useful than those in tutsplus (for developers i.e. for designers, theres tons of cool stuff there)
( )Gene July 3rd
I think magento is the beast of all open-source shopping carts.. But mastering magento + zend framework will make yourself a beast..
( )MXWest July 3rd
Magento can be slow – and a maze of twisty little passages at times – but the tradeoff of an extensible feature rich platform makes it impossible to not pay attention to it. A couple things that should be done on your server:
* Optimize MySQL
* Use Zend Server (Community Edition is free)
* When creating your interface/ theme, be sure to *only* bring in files that you need to change. Leave the default/default theme where it is – sym link into your interface. Magento loads your interface *and* the default – don’t duplicate files.
If you’re brand new – or coming from osCommerce – spend the $24.99 and buy the PDF book as well.
This is a complicated system with a steep learning curve for customization, skinning, and programming.
( )Roberto July 3rd
Oh thank you very very very very much!!!!!!!!
I was looking for something like this weeks ago because I need it for a personal project and here it’s!!!!!!
Thanks to all ENVATO people for doing this blogs, of course, the best of all the web.
Thanks again.
( )Glenn July 3rd
A lot of truth going on here, many good points to consider. I’m pretty heavily invested in Magento at this point, about to go live once the monstrous task of adding all the configurable products is done. I’ve got it running on a grid hosting package using GoDaddy, and it’s noticeably faster now than when it was on their shared hosting package.
But I’m not that great with code, and it looks like I’ll need to master a new skill set to make my store look the way I conceptualized it in PS.
If you’re looking for a simple way to sell online, not a lot of products, I’d look into http://www.foxycart.com. The checkout is pretty slick and you can get it to do all kinds on stuff. Support forums are great.
As for Magento, I’ll be clicking on some of the links in these comments to see if there’s something more manageable out there.
( )zigh July 3rd
magento, no thanks, been there not going back
Prestashop, yes fantastic, but needs Australian credit card modules like for eway or an Australian bank, some cahching would be good on prestashop, but looks to be the best. Apparently well programmed in Object Oriented PHP
Also the new series of oscommerce (current status 3.0 Alpha 5) looks like it should be pretty good, some say the code could be better, but I would rather have that then magento
( )Nokadota July 3rd
Oh this is just perfect. I’m looking at integrating Magento with Expression Engine and this screencast definitely helps [not with the integration, but using Magento].
Thanks for the tut!
( )Donna Miller | Wordpress Freelance Developer July 4th
Thanks to all the commenters who have posted about the problems with Magento’s speed, customization problems and the API changing all the time. I downloaded Magento months ago and still haven’t gotten around to installing it. Now after reading these comments I’m glad I didn’t find the time. Thank you all for saving me what I’m sure would have been lots of wasted time and frustration.
I’ve found a pretty good plugin that works with Wordpress. I think I’ll try that first, or possibly Download Guard, which is reasonably priced and has some of the best support I’ve ever seen.
( )Ian July 4th
About time someone posted an article on getting started with Magento.
One thing that get’s most amatures however are the email templates. Are you able to add this in to your tutorial?
Other than that, well done!
( )Dainis Graveris July 4th
This is really good tutorial! Know when I know how to start out, I think I’ll learn this CMS too a little bit
( )alex July 4th
what do you guys/slas think about x-cart as compared to magneto and others?
( )Darek July 4th
Yes, Instalation is easy. Instalation of plugins extension too.
( )Sometimes auto instalation extesion plugin is broken and all environment of magento is going to down.
Why it is given only extension key to install any plugin?
It is a pear instalation and pear chanel will be helpfull.
OLDSKULL July 5th
Great tutorial!
( )lovelyhrt July 5th
Hi
a very good article,I am trying to install Magento and before that have installed XAMPP,
I can open localhost/magento
however when i download which is the first i get following error message..
magento-core/Lib_Varien requires PHP extension “curl”
magento-core/Mage_Core_Modules requires package “magento-core/Lib_Varien” (version >= 1.3.2.2, version = 1.3.2.2, version = 1.3.2.2, version = 1.3.2.2, version = 1.3.2.2, version = 1.3.2, version <= 1.3.3, excluded versions: 1.3.3)
magento-core/Lib_PEAR requires PHP extension “curl”
Install Errors
No valid packages found
PEAR ERROR: install failed
Can you please help me with this
( )tom wornall July 7th
install this into the php
http://curl.haxx.se/
( )Kennedy July 5th
Nice tut! I have read a lot of complaints, but very little solutions. I know I am about to ask a very open question…What e-commerce do you think is the best?
( )Sean Schofield July 5th
I’ve never installed Magento but even the hosted demo is slow as hell so I can only imagine that it gets worse from there. My main objection to Magento (and any PHP based solution for that matter) is that these systems are very cookie cutter and extremely difficult to customize (which almost all real clients require.)
I also find their DB schema incomprehensible but that is the type of thing over which reasonable people can disagree.
Spree (http://spreecommerce.com) is a nice alternative if you’re comfortable using Ruby. In fact Ruby is what makes it special IMHO. (Full disclosure, I am the creator of Spree.) No enterprise licenses or any of that nonsense. We also have a very vibrant community.
Sorry to get off topic but since Spree was mentioned up thread, I thought I would chime in. Magento deserves credit for raising the standard as far as style, documentation and even some features go. Unfortunately they chose to use PHP which I think poses a lot of issues with performance and maintenance.
( )CITS July 5th
Magento is good for complex and customized ecommerce sites. It has a lot of features right out of the box. This comes at a cost, you need proper servers, and someone who can maintain and customize the php code for you.
If you need something basic and don’t want to spend any time [money] on it, go for virtuemart, zen or similar.
My money is on Magento!
( )Waasys July 6th
When I add a new item and try to search somthing I get an error mesage
Not Found
The requested URL /magento/catalogsearch/result/ was not found on this server.
WHY? help me somebody! please!
( )Martyn Web July 6th
Good tut for getting the thing installed but I would really like to see something more on how to build your own custom template rather than having several tutorials about installation.
Documentation is quite hard to follow and to have a screencast showing how to build your own design would be great, the design doesn’t even have to be complex, it could be really simple. I just need something to help get me started….
I’m sure many other people are in my situation.
( )Troy July 6th
Magento is by far the best eCommerce system out there from a retailer perspective. Meaning the reports, ease of use, etc, are wonderful and the best in the biz.
However, from a developer / Designer perspective, it’s a f*cking nightmare. The installation is a bear – if it will work with your host at all – the templating system is horrible, and it’s very slow.
But, like I said, it’s still the best our there for the client and if you charge hourly it can be very profitable for you.
( )Lee July 6th
I agree with some of the comments here. Setting up magento is a no-brainer so I’d love to see a getting started with skinning Magento because that seems to be the real difficult part.
( )Glenn July 6th
I agree with Martyn Web. If you follow Magento’s installation guide (or download their user guide for $20) they’re very clean on the installation process.
I would be so happy to see a screencast about taking a template concept built in Photoshop and then installing that template’s layout, images and CSS in Magento. This is area where the documentation is lacking.
( )tom July 6th
what do you all feel about opencart?
( )Sander July 6th
@Troy I think it’s primarily the learning curve that can be a little steep at first. Once you get the hang of it, you start to appreciate the flexibility the module system offers… no two projects are the same so the possibility to extend mostly anything with your own logic while keeping the rest intact is very nice…
( )Kishore July 7th
Thanks for the video tutorial option, it taught me as well as a teacher.
Thank You Ed Baxter, a good work from your side. Actually i am new to Magento, but i believe i go through all the things now
( )Kennedy July 7th
If you are tiring to install Magento on your localhost with wamp and you are receiving these errors:
PHP Extension “mcrypt” must be loaded
PHP Extension “curl” must be loaded
I have found a solution.
( )http://kennedysgarage.com/php-extension-mcrypt-must-be-loadedphp-extension-curl-must-be-loaded/
Jay July 7th
I’ve not had time to give Magento an install yet, but with regards to ’spec heavy’, what is it that is the bottleneck? CPU? RAM? IO? Or a combination of all 3 ? I’m only on a VPS, but it’s decently spec’d and I have 1.5gb of RAM to myself. Obviously, only an install will answer ‘will it work for me’ fully, but am intrigued to know what setups people have when they’re saying it’s ’slow’.
( )Jason Judge February 2nd
A combination of all three. The database is far to heavily normalised, with tables split out all over the place into multiple tables where they don’t need to be. RAM gets eaten over time, especially if you stay in the admin screen too long. The code is very repetitive in many places, doing the same thing many times over in different contexts.
( )Likhon July 8th
Thanks fot the nice tutorial.
( )Tony July 8th
Nice Job! I was thinking about using Magento and I think you just sold me!
( )Hieu Vo July 8th
haha, I’ve been recommanded to use Magento by a friend, but after reading comments of this article, I’ll try pressta first :”>
( )Allan July 9th
Nice tutorial! Hey can someone suggest a free host that suports Magento only to me try?
( )Reinaldo Novoa Jr. July 9th
Keep up the good work!
You should do a tut on customizing the magento template / interface. I think this is needed for ppl new to magento like myself.
( )Bern July 9th
There’s a few comments that Magento is too heavy for a small business. I completely disagree.
How simple can a business get? Chances are, a business will grow and change and you need a system that will be able to accommodate. I think with a few optimsation techniques (more nettuts on that please), should be able to improve Magento’s performance.
I’m a integration developer and so far I think Magento is well built for sound reliable customisations.
( )kodegeek July 10th
I like magento. Magento should have a lite version. Hope you will write articles for developer about magento.
Appreciate you to share this!
( )Narno July 10th
“However as we are working on localhost we need to do this to address an cookie issue.”
No, you can also create a custom virtual host for your local environment, for example http://www.magento.local.
It’s easy and convenient for further configuration of Magento, especially about the URL rewriting.
2 steps:
1. add Windows host:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
127.0.0.1 http://www.magento.local
2. add Apache vhost:
( )Get inspired examples in the file conf/vhost.conf
henk July 11th
Thanks for this very insightful videocast. It does give a good view on magento and on the basic setup of a webshop in general. What I would like to have seen is how the shop is connected to a payment provider, so how do you setup the checkout? In the end this is essential when you really start selling.
In Europe every country has it’s own payment system, like here in Holland they have ‘Ideal’ (next to Credit Cards and paypal of course). No clue how such a system is integrated.
( )Mike July 11th
A lot of people are complaining about the loading time on magento but I haven’t noticed any problem with this on our shared hosting. It loads at a decent speed and it’s well worth giving it a shot. Great tut and cant wait to see more!
( )Stephen Emlund July 13th
Anyone here using magento on godaddy shared hosting? Mine runs super-slow and I’ve read in Magento forums that there’s no way around it and simplehelix.com hosting is much better. Anyone know a solution to godaddy running slow for magento?
( )David July 13th
I am definetly interested in Magento, however a little surprise that this is the first time I have heard of Magento.
( )andre July 14th
nice tut, thanks!
( )diegop July 15th
excellent. i can´t wait for more
( )Per S July 17th
Would just like to add my five cents to this, and a little word of warning:
*DO NOT* use Magento unless you’re an above average PHP/Java programmer
*DO NOT* expect running a store in Magento flawlessly – you WILL experience a huge amount of confusing solutions and there are some bugs that can be very frustrating
*DO NOT* expect ANY decent documentation. Even the 25USD user guide is totally outdatet, and did not help me at all.
*DO NOT* expect the forum to help you out always – while you can sometimes find your answer there, it’s pretty dead nowadays. The developers do not post here anymore, and do not answer support questions from non-paying customers.
*DO NOT* use Magento if you have a big product catalog, with attributes (colors/sizes etc) It’s an absolute NIGHTMARE to work with.
*DO NOT* expect plugins to solve all your configuration issues
Please bear with me, I’m not writing this to bash Magento – it really is an extremely powerfull ecommerce solution, but ease of use is certainly NOT one of the selling points. It’s very hard to customize, and and new update may put your store down for months, because it’s no longer compatible with how you built the store in the first place.
If you do not have a lot of time, and programming experience, expect to pay large amounts to get the store working the way you want.
All this being said,it’s NOT a bad solution if you know how to use it, and I expect that down the road, with some more updates and bug fixes, and a much more active community, we’ll be wondering why we ever considered anything else.
( )Jason Judge February 2nd
IMO it needs to fork. Building a proper community without the shackles of Varien is going to be the only way to get the bugs in this thing fixed.
( )marcin July 18th
That’s true it’s really slow, even on localhost it takes a lot of time to add simple product. Obviosly it’s pretty good piece of e-commerce app but there is one thing that magento team should work on: performance.
( )Sven July 22nd
Please stop glorifying magento!
It’s not that superb, only their marketing is.
Every release comes with numerous bugs.
It’s sloooooow
Getting the right prices for configurable products are a pain in the ***
…
For future ecommerce projects, I’ll try PrestaShop, a real open source platform
( )izzet July 22nd
perfect work..thanks..
( )Lesya July 23rd
Magento is really popular shopping cart lately. The numbers speak for themselves. If you also want to join constantly growing number of magento users you should try online service cart2cart. This service automates data migration from your shopping cart to Magento. (www.shopping-cart-migration.com)
( )jan July 29th
heho @ all
i´ve developed two magentoshops so far and must admit that there are
definately problems getting this monster up and runinng smoothly.
the backend is just perfekt for clients, pretty good speed, nice navigation
and full of options to customize your shop’s behaviour.
the thing is… skinning… skinning… skinning.
the mix of phtml/xml/css ist just a bummer.
took me ages the first time, the second time it ran rather smoothly,
so if anyone needs help skinning just drop me a few lines and i`ll
try to help
the same with the community on magentocommerce official forums,
( )if you post there dont expect to get some official statements from the dev’s
Alistair Stead July 31st
Great tutorial for installing and setting up the Magento platform. I have compiled a list of sources for further information and tutorials. The first on the list is an explanation of how Magento works for Wordpress and Drupal users.
This is by no means extensive but the sites listed include lots of helpful Magento content and tutorials.
http://www.designdisclosure.com/2009/07/how-to-magento-ecommerce-tutorials/
Alistair
( )bentoi August 1st
hi I’m quite upset of the local installation of magento there always issues occurred. I’ll just try another open source e commerce but I need something which is light and easy to install in local for me to work around with it. What would it be? I need only php based application. thnx
( )yassir August 5th
A question for all people who says it is slow . Have you tried it on a proper hardware ?
( )pals8o August 14th
How do u transfer magento from a localhost to a live site? i need to know how to change the database name.
( )cookie moster August 23rd
Great Tutorial
( )JD August 24th
I’ve definitely expired the steep learning curve and I come from a serious J2EE background. HOWEVER I can absolutely recommend Magento as it does have amazing power and flexibility.
On decent hardware (e.g. virtual server on dreamhost), the performance is more than acceptable.
The ability to host multiple sites and skins on top of a single codebase and database is killer, you will definitely appreciate this if your client grows and adds other languages or other brands…
( )Mike September 10th
It’s certainly not for the novice. I can’t even get a product to display on the home page….
Install = easy
Adding Products =Easy
Speed seems fine to me on a $20 a month Media Temple hosting account. If you can’t afford $20 a month why are you running a store?
Still… might just go back to using zen cart.
( )Jasdeep September 13th
how can we do that?
( )Setup 3 stores using one category. Stores will be 1) Canada, 2) USA, and 3) UK.
- Goal is to use same inventory for all 3 stores from the backend and have ability to adjust prices depending on the store itself.
Martin September 24th
Does anyone have any examples of live websites which are using Magento for their eCommerce? I would like to see how the speed compares to other sites from an end-user perspective.
From a back-end perspective, it seems to suck badly – surely it can’t be normal for saving a product to take 4 minutes when I’m running on my localhost!
( )Alfredo September 29th
I’ve been using Prestashop for a month now and find it VERY easy to manage.
The bad news is that it still has no a good base of users, so the help in the forum arrives late.. or never.
There are not much templates (free or pay) to choose from.
Try Prestashop and you will find that in less than an hour you can setup a pretty descent store.
( )ali October 15th
thanks great work
( )hits November 3rd
thanku..
( )shakti November 15th
Thanks man ….All others forget to tell the last step to configure varien.php file
( )…..u don’t
WS November 20th
Great video! But…
I downloaded & installed WAMP. I unzipped and added the magento files in the localhost folder wamp/www/magento so far so so good. But when I try to access magento in WAMP (http://localhost/magento/) I get this error message:
Fatal error: Method Varien_Object::__tostring() cannot take arguments in C:\wamp\www\magento\lib\Varien\Object.php on line 488
which is this:
public function __toString(array $arrAttributes = array(), $valueSeparator=’,')
{
$arrData = $this->toArray($arrAttributes);
return implode($valueSeparator, $arrData);
}
Is the problem that something is incompatible with the 5.3 version of PHP?
( )What do I do now?
Thank you for any help.
Lakeshia Burnside December 14th
I’m getting the same error and i have the same directory setup. Did you get this resolved?
( )RV November 25th
To me the Joomla – Magento bridge offer by Yireo (http://www.yireo.com) is a brilliant tool. It allows you to do most of your templating and content management with Joomla yet still have the e-commerce advantages of Magento.
( )Anthony January 12th
Killer Tutorial! Magento is truly amazing… It’s rare to see an open source platform that can do so much. If anyone is having trouble or wants some custom Magento work, let me know! Thanks again for the excellent article.
( )Ashish January 19th
Do you know if you can customize Magento to serve as a Rental store?
( )maicon February 8th
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