Magento is the fastest growing open source ecommerce platform available today and has been tipped by many to dominate the ecommerce sector over the next few years. A quick look at Google trends supports this and shows that since its launch in 2008 Magento has quickly overtaken the previous open source favourite Oscommerce in the search volume stakes.

But, it’s not without its problems. It is ultimately an enterprise level product that is being offered free of charge, as a result many novice developers are attempting to use it and quickly running into problems.

Here are a few tips that should help Magento newbie’s:-

1) Make sure you spend some time reading the user guide, it costs less than $30 and whilst not perfect it will help you to understand the different elements of the system. In particular, make sure you have a solid grasp of the different product types, attributes, attribute sets and custom options. You’ll need to understand where and how each product type should be used or you’ll end up wasting time on unnecessary tasks.

2) Make sure you set the correct file and folder permissions. A LOT of the problems people have with Magento can be traced back to incorrect permission settings. If you are having problems set all files to 644 and all folders to 755, you’ll be amazed how many problems this solves. In addition, you may need to reset these permissions after upgrading or installing new items as Magento has a habit of changing file permissions.

3) If you are installing Magento in a subfolder on your site make sure you change the “rewritebase” in the htaccess file to reflect the location of your Magento install. If you don’t you’ll get 404 errors for most of your pages as the URL’s will be rewritten incorrectly.

4) Don’t try and run Magento on cheap hosting and if you do don’t complain if it’s slow! One of the biggest complaints we see on the web is people constantly bashing Magento for being slow. Ok, it’s not as light as Oscommerce but on a modest well setup server we are managing sub-second page loads quite easily. It’s also getting a lot faster; version 1.4 is a huge improvement over version 1.3.

5) Finally, whilst you or your developers are building your site turn off Magento’s built in caching system. If you don’t your changes won’t be reflected on the front end of the site. This has confused many people including a few experienced developers!

The above is just a few tips to get you started, as a final note I’d like to strongly recommend that you persevere with Magento. Once you get to grips with it you’ll find that it’s not nearly as complicated as you first thought.