Installing Magento…

Thanks for the info Scotty.

I have a question……..I have been everywhere in the admin panel and do not see where to set up payment modules (per say)

Have you used it and can you link it to paypal or other online payment portals?

Go to System>Configuration> on the left you will see a long vertical menu. In ‘Sales’ section you will see ‘paypal accounts’ and ‘payment methods’

I am looking on the sample cpanel on their site and it is just not there.

I think I will have to put it on my server to see what I need!

Thanks for the info!

yea the system menu in that demo only has 2 sub-menu items, Tools and Design…

In the full site there are about 10 sub-menu items.

I sent Becca to your post this morning because we have several customers that need a good e-Commerce solution. Thanks for the head’s up Scotty, and for your assistance. Becca is checking out the software now to see if this will be worthy of our time!

Hi Scotty
Sounds a lot of work just to demo on JSAS/Xammp? Does it offer much compared to others? or is it the hook of templates for it that grabs ya?

Apart from the sample database I haven’t come across any bugs yet. The non product pages look like they have to be hand coded. The whole thing looks a little ‘BETA’ but I guess it just takes a little getting used to.

I’ll post a proper review in a few days when I’ve had a chance to test out everything.

It’s quiet different (and better organised) to others I’ve tried but so far so good.

I haven’t even looked at the extensions available yet.

Being playing around with this a bit more. Happy to report still no bugs.

I really like the way the backend is layed out -- easy to navigate, clean and clear.

I don’t know what happened to your post on the Magento Forum, but after spending an hour there, reading a lot of posts, I don’t think I’ll even bother trying Magento at all. I simply do not understand why eCommerce software has to, in the majority of cases, be so bloated with features. I have not yet been able to find a SIMPLE eCommerce program. Guess I’ll have to stick with my Prestashop for now.

Yet, this is your desire for an eCommerce system, where others like me look for a feature-rich application that can compete with major strores or can be customized at least to later compete with large retailers’ online stores…. That is why Magento is one of the system on my current list of useful eCommerce systems.

When you look for a SIMPLE solution, try SIMPLE CADDY. (Listed in the JED)

I’ve tried Simple Caddy….as I’ve tried every JED eCommerce extension, plus about 30 other eCommerce softwares. I’ve settled on Prestashop, and have even had a Joomlart template ported to it, so it looks great. Not everyone wants to compete with the Big Boys, but I appreciate your words, thank you 🙂

When I look at Prestashop, I do not see there anything SIMPLE, this looks same like the features of VirtueMart in the frontend…in the backend it is really more simple set and arranged as VM. But to the features I think both system have quite the same, except all the third party modules available for Joomla/VM.

And it is not really about competing with the big boys but to keep track with them.

http://www.prestashop.com/en/showcase_demo/

I guess everyone’s interpretation of simple is different For myself, I use only Direct Deposit and Money Order, I do not use any shipping modules( I post only within Australia, and have a set flat rate), i do not need any other modules so, for ME Prestashop is the closest to what I have been looking for. I used VM for about 3 years, and could not cope with the problems/no help/etc. I originally looked at ( and tried to test install, Magento because i also sought/still seek, a multi store/cart…however, I could not even install it( and there are many on the Magento Forum who are still struggling with it)…. I had read on my travels/search that Magento had, or was about to have multi store/cart capabilities…..never did find out LOL
Anyway, as ever, it’s different strokes for different folks….cheers mate 🙂

Honestly, I threw all the shipping modules and whatever payment solutions out, I only use one flat fee shipping rate given by my wholesaler and 2-3 forms of payment, except PayPal, none of the included modules. That there are so many of those is the benefit they promote, also when I do not need those, I see people struggle with all the payment and shipping stuff as they want to set up those ship by weight and so on, but that is their decision. To have it kind of easy to customize VirtueMart is one pluspoint, it is surely easier for a professional, but as I do not know how prestashop looks inside by now, I can only refer to the demo yet….Much success anyway!

l want to try this now

Magento is pretty good, but there’s not an overly greater benefit than what you get with virtuemart.

Personally, I was quite baffled with how you put items to display on the front page without hard coding it via html, maybe I was just silly.

The back end is definitely better designed and significantly more user-friendly.

l want to try this now

Then try it: http://www.magentocommerce.com/;)

Magento is pretty good, but there’s not an overly greater benefit than what you get with virtuemart.

Personally, I was quite baffled with how you put items to display on the front page without hard coding it via html, maybe I was just silly.

The back end is definitely better designed and significantly more user-friendly.

Try http://www.prestashop.com also not bad and very simple in the backend.

I just installed Magento yesterday and ran into a few issues. If your admin menus won’t work or if you can’t access Magento Connect, try chmod all folders and contents to 0755. This solved everything for me. Magento is far better than any e-commerce component I’ve seen for Joomla, and I mean this suite is sweet! But the CMS functionality is very limited, so don’t expect nearly the ease of use that Joomla provides. Now if JA provides matching Magento templates to their current and future Joomla templates, this would be an amazing combination!

Then try it: http://www.magentocommerce.com/;)

I dont think magento will work with many host,

I use Rochen, the hosting provider used by Joomla.org. Everything worked on MG on the first install. Just have to make sure folder/file permissions are set to 755.

Then you just have to find a host that has installed and configured LAMP according to Magento specs, or do what my friend did and buy your own box and install eveything yourself. I’m pretty happy with Rochen, but I will try to move to Amazon EC2. Let you know how that goes in the future.

All the info about instance sizes, computing power, RAM, and storage are listed at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance. You can also set up MySQL DB on an EBS volume so you can direct many server instances to one database, effectively loadbalancing and increasing resources as you site traffic increases. Pretty cool stuff but you need really good skills to make this work.

I use Rochen, the hosting provider used by Joomla.org. Everything worked on MG on the first install. Just have to make sure folder/file permissions are set to 755.

before that everyone should check magento-check.php , which l did and possible so l will stay with aeyweb.com.

It is not about the host, it is about that one reads all the docs and then does the installation, all what I see is that people install it with Joomla knowledge whatsoever and wonder why it does now work out. There is no issue with Magento, it is the lack of willing to learn first by the users who tried it, did not work, threw the system away again, nothing else…

l did read instruction but never had a time to read all and work out how it works however l will soon and see with magento-check.php.

l did read instruction but never had a time to read all and work out how it works however l will soon and see with magento-check.php.

That is crucial to Magento, when you then learned and know how it works any further installation will go quite easy. It is simply not like Joomla and VirtueMart it is more like a Typo3 Installation where you really need to read first and all, and I know as I tested Typo3, the only competition to Joomla and said to be better though, when messing up one simple step in the installation the whole site will not work correctly, admin will maybe show up, but frontend not and so on. Think you will get it done, much fun with it indeed!

magento looks promising. But if I virtue mart I can simply manage without programming skills will it be possible with magento?

I mentioned that the Magento’s CMS is not very intuitive and nothing as powerful as Joomla, but everything works out of the box. Installing extensions for Magento is really easy; you just copy and paste a numerical extension key into your system and press go. That’s it! I’m very impressed with Magento, but the templates are very pricey. Once JA (or JM) has more templates to choose from, it will be the best deal on the web. Most single templates run around $180. You can all Google this information or go test Magento yourselves. One safe bet is to get an account at Rochen and install Magento because I’ve done it and it’s hassle free.