Among open source e-commerce platforms, Magento has emerged in a relatively short period of time as the most popular, advanced e-commerce platform on the market. Since 2008, Magento has evolved to claim its own place as an advanced, extendable system.

Magento Inc. claims that people have downloaded the Magento software package over 2.5 million times and that it is used by over 80,000 merchants around the world. Undoubtedly, most of these downloads are of the Community version of the platform. The Professional and Enterprise versions are premium priced, while Community remains free to use as it is — or as you can modify it to meet your needs.

Unfortunately, many find Magento to be more complex and unwieldy than they might prefer. It's understandable given that a basic, initial install of Magento Community includes more than 28,000 files. The Model-View-Controller architecture of Magento as well as the sheer depth of included features contributes to the complexity of the system.

While millions may have downloaded Magento, far fewer have succeeded in mastering the installation, configuration, management, and extendibility of the system. Magento Inc. doesn't provide direct support or substantial online documentation for the Magento Community. Newcomers generally find they are investing a huge amount of time navigating the labyrinth of files, testing possible configurations offered in online forums (many of which are not necessarily correct), and learning by making lots of mistakes. It's not uncommon to find new Magento users — designers and developers, especially — deleting an entire installation and re-installing from scratch, sometimes more than once.

The good news is that Magento, while indeed complex, does not have to be a dreadful experience. There are thousands of others like you who do share great information on online forums and blogs; the system, once you understand its basic building blocks, will absolutely amaze you with its features. And, of course, you have this book to help you get up to speed in far less time than ever before possible.

Mastering Magento was written to be an Owners Manual for Magento, specifically for those who administer, design, or develop with this platform. Administrators will learn how to configure and manage their online e-commerce store. By understanding the theming system of Magento and basic architecture structures, designers can give online stores amazing new looks beyond the usual collection of installable templates. Most importantly, those charged with installing, configuring, and extending the actual platform deployment — the developers — will realize how the system's programming components connect with the intended functionality in order to give the administrator even better performance, features, and control. Developers will quickly become Magento mavens, shortcutting weeks and months of arduous research and trial.

As an Owners Manual, this book is designed to be more of a reference than a tutorial. While there are step-by-step guides throughout, the book is not intended to be a 1-2-3 guide to installing and operating a Magento store. Its purpose is to give you specific information on the different aspects of this grand platform, according to your needs. If you're a designer, you may not need more than a cursory peak at the chapter on product management, instead focusing your time on the chapter on using themes to brand your store. As an administrator, you'll no doubt find more value learning about managing non-product content than about tuning the server for peak performance. That said, it will serve all those who become involved in a Magento installation to give every chapter at least a brief read in order to understand how all the interconnections of files, functions, and features combine to power Magento-based web stores.

For the sake of full disclosure, this book is not a complete Magento guide. Much of the basic installation and operation of Magento is quite transparent or easily understood through online documentation. However, from my own experience, in order to fully utilize the enormous power of Magento, a deeper understanding and application of Magento's features was not — until this book — easily accessible or convenient. I have spent hundreds of hours researching, testing, and documenting so many of Magento's aspects, that it became apparent that others like me could benefit from having a compiled collection of these processes.

This book focuses on the latest version of Magento Community: version 1.6. Many of the concepts discussed remain applicable to earlier versions, but don't assume the configurations and programming presented here will work. If you're entirely new to Magento, you'll be installing version 1.6 anyway, as there is no compelling reason to use an earlier version unless there is a particular must-have extension or theme that only works with an earlier version. Even in this case, it is perhaps better to urge the developer to update their work to version 1.6, rather than go through the potential potholes of updating to 1.6 later.

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