Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Magento is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you the ability to create and manage a profitable online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition provides guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition guides you through the installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders. You will start with installing Magento on a hosting provider or on your local machine for testing purposes. From there, you will learn everything Magento has to offer, from working with products to adding additional functions.After installing Magento, you'll learn how to set up your first store and add multiple stores in the same environment. One of Magento's strengths, the product catalogue, will also be discussed thoroughly. From there we'll continue to set up payment and shipping methods. You'll learn to use themes to give your store the look and feel you need. As well as that, you'll start using extensions to expand Magento's functionality and you'll learn to process your first orders.You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your personalized store and also about Magento's directory structure and find out where some of the elements of a store are customized. As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, working online store.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Requirements


Before we jump into action, it's good to have a closer look at Magento's requirements. What do you need to run it?

Simply put, all up-to-date requirements for Magento can be found here:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/system-requirements.

But maybe that's a bit overwhelming if you are just a beginner. So let's break this up into the most essential stuff:

Requirement

Notes

Operating system: Linux

Magento runs best on Linux, as offered by most hosting companies. Don't worry about your local test environment as that will run on Windows or Mac as well. But for your live store you should go in for a Linux solution because if you decide to run it on anything else other than Linux for a live store, it will not be supported.

Web server: Apache

Magento runs on Versions 1.3.x, 2.0.x, and 2.2.x of this very popular web server. As of Version 1.7 of Magento community and Version 1.12 of Magento Enterprise there's a new web server called Nginx that is compatible as well.

Programming language: PHP

Magento has been developed using PHP, a programming language which is very popular. Many major open source solutions such as WordPress and Joomla! for instance, have been built using PHP.

Use Versions 5.2.13 - 5.3.15. Do not use PHP4 anymore, nor use PHP 5.4 yet!

PHP extensions

Magento requires a number of extensions, which should be available on top of PHP itself. You will need: PDO_MySQL, mcrypt, hash, simplexml, GD, DOM, Iconv, and Curl. Besides that you also need to have the possibility to switch off ''safe mode''.

You do not have a clue about all of this? Don't worry. A host offering Magento services already takes care of this. And for your local environment there are only a few additional steps to take. We'll get there in a minute.

Database: MySQL

MySQL is the database, where Magento will store all data for your store. Use Version 4.1.20 or (and preferably) newer.

As you can see, even in a simplified format, there are quite some things that need to be taken care of. Magento hosting is not as simple as hosting for a small WordPress or Joomla! website, currently the most popular open source solutions to create a regular site. The requirements are higher and you just cannot expect to host your store for only a couple of dollars per month. If you do, your online store may still work, but it is likely that you'll run into some performance issues. Be careful with the cheapest hosting solutions. Although Magento may work, you'll be consuming too that need server resources soon. Go for a dedicated server or a managed VPS (Virtual Private Server), but definitely for a host that is advertising support of Magento.