Magento is NOT WordPress

So recently I have had to dive into learning how to theme Magento. Which is good, because I have always wanted to learn, and while I tried in the past, I just never had the time. You know how it is. Work is providing this opportunity, and I want to share something of my findings with you. One thing in particular, because it is such a pain in the ass. First though, let me start by saying that Magento is NOT WordPress. Obviously, right? I thought though, that some things would be similar. One issue was adding a CMS Page to the Main Navigation. One would think that this would be easy enough to do, but it is not. It is actually extremely frustrating if you have no idea how to do it. For all that Magento is, what it is not is an easy to use content management system. It is a store, which sounds stupid because everyone knows that, but while it does that well, it does some things poorly. If you have had trouble, like me, and searched for the answer, you came across some pages that didn’t explain how to do what you are asking, or gave links to extensions to Magento to do it for you. Here is the quickest way possible to add a cms page to the main navigation.

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Got it installed last night

If you read my post yesterday, you know I installed Magento – eCommerce Platform. I have to say, after I actually got it it loaded an ready to go, it seemed more scary than it was. If you want to see what it looks like, take my rul and replace /blog with /magento. I don’t want to post a link, because I don’t want anyone trolling that isn’t reading this, and I got a ton of spam the past few days.

Love at first site?

Not love, but my thought was, “Wow, this is a nicely organized admin panel (which you can see a screen shot of below). Seemed easy enough to understand from the looks of it. You would be dead wrong though, if you thought that. Which I did….and I was. I have played with it now for about 2 hours, which in all honesty, you will need to do also if you plan on using it. If you have never used an eCommerce platform before, like me, then there is some stuff that will confuse the crap out of you. Getting a new product to display was not easy. Why? Because you have to create a category, which has a ton of options to choose and fill out, to put the product in. Then you have to create the product, make sure you place it into the category, fill out pricing, tax info, and a bunch of other stuff. It took me an hour and a half to actually get 1 product up.

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Magento has a cool logo!

Seriously, it does. But that has nothing to do with anything. I decided to finally check Magento out because of all the stuff I keep reading. I’m here to give you a couple pointers. The instructions for installation, which you can read here, are actually pretty good. With a few exceptions of course. So if you are interested in trying out Magento, read this before you start.

NOTE: If you are installing this live (meaning not locally to test), do NOT import the sample data.

Setting up the database

Before you actually do the install of Magento, you must create a new database. I’m not going to walk you through how to do that, but if you use phpAdmin, it is easy even for a noob. You also must import sample data into the database. Do NOT, and I repeat, do NOT download the one they provide, as you will most likely get an error message. Go to this forum thread, download the sample data from the last post on the page (1.2.0 revised). Import went fine after that.

The full release

There are a couple of options on how to download Magento. I picked the Full Release option. If you go that route, download it, unzip it, open it up, and you will find a folder called ‘magento’. That is the folder you want to upload. Unless you are installing into the root, in which case, I can’t help you. But it wasn’t unclear if I had to unzip the file first or not. Through some searching, the answer is no. You just need all of what is in that folder. Be warned, it is a lot.

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