You have probably heard of Magento. It is an out-of-the-box e-commerce platform with many features, such as catalog navigation, promotion rules, RSS feeds, product search, product tags, product reviews, tax rules, reports, and order management.
The company behind Magento is Varien. In 2007, they started thinking about an open source e-commerce platform that would be designed for a large number of uses. After one year of developing, the first stable release Magento 1.0 came out in 2008. When Magento became more popular in the later years, eBay showed interest in it and now owns 100 percent of Magento.
If you install Magento and configure it, then you can start selling products online. But when you want a custom theme, extra shipping methods, and other features, you have to extend the software as per the rules of Magento. If you know something about PHP programming, follow the steps described in the recipes, and you can start editing your Magento store.
We will create a development environment where you can start working. We will install sample data so that the shop is not empty and is ready to go. If you are new, you can start here. If you are a pro, you can still start here, because we follow the best practices of Magento development. Let's get started. Good luck!