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

Using attribute sets


An attribute is useless if it doesn't belong to an attribute set. When creating products you do not individually choose attributes that you need. The very first step when creating a product is always to tell Magento which attribute set you want to use. As already mentioned, you cannot change the attribute set of your product later on. To be able to use our freshly-created attribute, we need to add it to a set. Yes, of course, it is possible to use one attribute set only and just add all attributes to that one. But that won't be smart, because it would mean that suddenly for my TV the heel height could become a mandatory field. And it would even be shown to our visitors! No, that's not the way to do it, you need to create an attribute sets per product group, for items using the same attributes.

Navigate to Catalog | Attributes | Manage Attribute Sets to check what's already available:

Nothing much, right? Just one default set. If you installed the Magento demo content,...