Introduction to Magento

What is Magento

Magento is the best open source ecommerce content management system. No other ecommerce platform provides such vast features as provided by Magento.

Magento comes in two main flavors: Community edition and Enterprise edition. Enterprise edition is commercial with some extra features and expert support. Community edition is open source and free. Its good for developers who can customize it and develop it according to their needs.

This tutorial uses magento version 1.9.1.1.

Magento Installation

To install magento follow the steps:

  • Go to www.magentocommerce.com/products/downloads/magento/. Choose the ver 1.9.1.1 and select the format in which you want to download the it. Make sure you logged in before you click on the download button else it will ask for login.
  • Once downloaded, extract the magento bundle and copy the magento folder. I am using wamp so I place the magento folder in my www folder. If you are working on live then place the files within magento folder on your root server.
  • Create a database for your magento. For this tutorial, I have created database 'magento'.
  • After this, go to url localhost/magento. It will show a license agreement page. Accept the license and click on the "Continue" button.
  • Choose the locale setting according to your needs. I have left the default setting. Click on the "Continue" button.
  • Next page shows the configuration settings. For database connection, leave the host as "localhost". Since we are using "magento" as our database put the database name as "magento". For wamp I put the the username as "root" and left the password blank(""). This is the default setting for MySQL user for wamp. If you have created a user for your database then you should put your user details accordingly. Last, for table prefix, you can leave it blank but if you have decided to give your tables some prefix then make sure you put underscore ("_") after you prefix. Example: mg_.
  • Within web access options, leave the base URL as it is. For admin path you can choose any value. It is the path from where admin can log into magento backend. I have left it blank so to log into magento I will use following path: http://localhost/magento/admin. That's all. Click on the "Continue" button to begin the installation.
  • Final page is the create admin account page. Fill in your details. If you leave encryption key input field as blank then magento will automatically generate the key for you. Make sure you note it down somewhere at some safe place. Click continue and magento will start to install. It might take some time so be patient.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed magento. Now go to frontend or backend. Explore.