Trying out Magento

Well, I’ll probably have to work with Magento in the near future. So I thought it might be a good idea to give it a try upfront and to prepare myself a bit. I’ll note down what I did, what I found out and what I think about Magento.

Getting Magento

The Magento-Website leaves new users alone with the question, which installer is the right one. Is it the Magento installer, or the full package that I need for a fresh installation? I chose the installer package as it seemed to be the smaller one. Together with the installer .tar.gz file, I also downloaded the sample data as I’ve heard rumors that this is useful to get a first grip on Magento.

The installation

Create an empty database

As usual, installing a shop system or CMS needs an empty database. Create one using e.g. phpMyAdmin. I also created a new user that has all rights, but only for this newly created database.

Installing the sample data

First unpack the sample data file with

root@server:/var/www/path/to/magento/# tar -xzf filename

Then read the dump file into the newly created database:

root@server:/var/www/path/to/magento/sample-data# mysql -u USERNAME -p DATABASENAME < magento_sample_data_for_1.2.0.sql

Check the database with e.g. phpMyAdmin – it contains impressive 229 tables now The last step is then to move the content of the media folder to magento’s media folder.

Installing curl

Once I started the installation wizard, it told me that the PHP module curl is not loaded, but needs to be. On my system (Debian), the following two commands did the job:

root@server:/var/www/path/to/magento# apt-get install php5-curl
root@server:/var/www/path/to/magento# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

(notice: an apache2 reload doesn’t work, needs to be restarted completely!!)

The Installer

The installer will lead you through the whole process of configuration, especially the DB config and some other details. After that, you can log-in to the new Magento Shop. Compared to other systems that I could try out, it’s pretty nice. Does exactly what is needed.

After the installation

Once installed, the admin-interface welcomes me with the message that there is an updated version available – great! Back at magentocommerce.com I can see, that the installer which I chose is not as current as the full package download. Hmpf.

It’s nice that the admin-interface informs about updates and contains a notice like “don’t forget to change the phone number before going live” in the message inbox. But is there a need to inform new users about releases of Magento that date earlier as the currently installed version? And no, there is no “select all and delete’em all button”.

Ok, now I have a working Magento setup – but I’m not able to use it. Mainly due to the sheer amount of possible settings. It’s not just about adding a product and sell it. There are categories, pages, shipping methods, taxes, … Crazy. And cool, that all these features are already in! But it looks like setting up Magento is more than just 30 minutes of work. It needs some more time to understand all the details. Conclusion: They didn’t lie when they wrote that Magento is an enterprise-level shop system.

Net step: I’ll get a book on Magento.