Magento

Anyone who knows me pretty much knows I don’t hold much love for Magento. I respect the system and even more so the business the founders made by creating Magento, but every time I’ve worked with it, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that this should be simpler. A LOT simpler.

I remember first hearing about Magento in 2007 when I worked at iFrogz and at the time it was the first full featured cart that actually looked decent. Which wasn’t hard considering your choices at the time in the open source e-commerce field were pretty much OScommerce and Zencart. I remember doing a quick install of it locally and I was impressed at how simple the setup was. Fast forward a few years and Magento has done nothing but grow, in all respects. To say this code base is bloated is an understatement. But, I’m sure that works well with their business plan.

Regardless, my new work had earlier selected Magento as their platform of choice and I’ve finally learned to just roll with this punch. So, on to working with Magento. Getting it installed is no longer so trivial. Especially it seems on OSX.

Here is how I got it working on OSX Mountain Lion using MAMP.

  1. Install MAMP
  2. Download lastest Magento (1.7.0.2 was latest)
  3. I just put it in a folder in MAMP htdocs folder called magento
  4. Create database via phpmyadmin
  5. Fix “magento PHP Extensions “0” must be loaded” error by doing the next step.

Open app/code/core/Mage/Install/etc/config.xml in an editor and change around line 72 change

<pdo_mysql/>

to

<pdo_mysql>1</pdo_mysql>

Then browse to 127.0.0.1:8888/magento/ and run through the install. For some reason using localhost:8888 doesn’t work, something to do with no periods in the domain… fun, fun, fun.

Overall not too bad. Now it’s time to create that new theme.

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