Magento

Good evening.
I apologize in advance if this was already asked but I have been looking for some kind of setup manual and I can’t find any.
Did I miss it somewhere? If it doesn’t exist, will you produce one once Ver.1 is reached?
Thank you.

I think that this should help you:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/categories/category/installation-setup/

I’ve installed magento, and I’ve even added a product. but it’s not showing up, probably because I haven’t turned on a catalog or something.

Is there a page that has the logical steps from installation to seeing your products on your site? There seems to be some disconnect between these two things. I keep looking for some kind of ordered how-to manual but all I can find are isolated tutorials and articles that explain things - layered filtering for instance - it looks great, but the article never mentions where you go to turn this on or enable it.

I know I must be missing something obvious.

I think there’s going to be a great potential market for “Magento For Dummies” or “Magento: A User’s Guide.”
Anyone working on one of these?

Which begs another question: I see several places where ”Training and Certification” is mentioned, but no details. Can anyone shed any light? Are there training and certification workshops available now, or are these planned following the production release?

@Tansau, training and certification are not available at this time but will be offered in the very near future. We will post more information after the release of the production version of Magento.

A great place to start would be with the Knowledge Base mentioned above or the screencast section.

If you still need help, there is the Magento Professional Installation .

Thanks Adi,

I checked the knowledge base, and again, it’s got a smattering of good walkthroughs, but it’s not in any kind of order… even the “add a simple product” walks you through the addition and then says you can preview the product on the catalog, but I still have no catalog live on my site.

beau - 29 February 2008 10:57 AM

Thanks Adi,

I checked the knowledge base, and again, it’s got a smattering of good walkthroughs, but it’s not in any kind of order… even the “add a simple product” walks you through the addition and then says you can preview the product on the catalog, but I still have no catalog live on my site.

You might be making the classic mistake of not having store view correct.  In upper left corner is a drop down and you have to Pick English store and enable your categories, products etc there.  Also make sure “enabled” is selected in prouduct setup

adimagento - 28 February 2008 02:24 PM

A great place to start would be with the Knowledge Base mentioned above or the screencast section..

Minor suggestion here: it would be helpful to have the screencasts in a downloadable, “podcast” version. The information in this is wonderful, and I’d love to have them on my iPod for quick reference.

@Tansau, we will definitely look into that option in the near future. Thank you for the suggestion, keep them coming, this is what we’re here for. =)

beau - 28 February 2008 02:09 PM

I’ve installed magento, and I’ve even added a product. but it’s not showing up, probably because I haven’t turned on a catalog or something.

Is there a page that has the logical steps from installation to seeing your products on your site? There seems to be some disconnect between these two things.

I’m having the exact same problem here. I’ve installed everything, added a product, enabled it, and added it to a category and a store. I still can’t get anything to show up on the store home page.

Sorry for my late reply but I had some connection issues.
What I meant by “Setup manual” was not about “installation” (although that could be the first part of a setup manual).
I installed the products fine in half an hour.
My questions was about what happens next: What are the basic system setups? how do you setup a store? How do you setup a product? how do you setup tiered pricing? How do you mass-load categories? Products? Prices? Customers? etc…
I know that this forum is a good start but I think that a key thing for this product to take off once it reaches v1 will be to have a summarized downloadable document explaining all those points. A word or pdf format would have my preference.

A full user guide book is in the works. We expect it to be published in May.

A book? In my experience with open-source apps (Mambo, Joomla, Blender), by the time the book makes it to the store, you’ll be 10 releases on down the line and half of the information will be useless.

But okay. Good luck with that.

What about the wiki? Can’t the articles be ported into there?

Magento is unlike any other open source app Most of the information will be available online and the book will be available in May. Additional books by 3rd parties should be published by then as well.

RoyRubin - 06 March 2008 06:22 AM

A full user guide book is in the works. We expect it to be published in May.

No offence but this is a bit of a ludicrous response. May? Are you serious? I too have got magento working, have created a couple of products, have watched a few screencasts (that’s videos to everyone else) and have fiddled for some hours in the backend trying to find whatever it is that may be necessary to switch on in order to get the frontend working. No joy. I simply don’t know how to see the frontend. And you say we’ll have to wait till May before we can find out info that would take someone knowledgeable with the system 15 mins to put together in a page and a half?

I appreciate the work you’re doing and the potential quality of the product you are offering. Nevertheless you are wasting an awful lot of people’s time by telling them to download magento and expect it to work ‘out of the box’. For those of us who are not programmers but have some technical proficiency the lack of clear explanations is the single greatest barrier to entry for the vast majority of people into the open source movement. Cop on and put together a few pages - say 4 - which will take yourselves between 1 and 2 hours to put together and which outline the system in a way that is useful to what you programmers generally refer to with some contempt as ‘newbies’. Thank you.

Liam - 12 March 2008 02:45 PM

RoyRubin - 06 March 2008 06:22 AM

A full user guide book is in the works. We expect it to be published in May.

No offence but this is a bit of a ludicrous response. May? Are you serious? I too have got magento working, have created a couple of products, have watched a few screencasts (that’s videos to everyone else) and have fiddled for some hours in the backend trying to find whatever it is that may be necessary to switch on in order to get the frontend working. No joy. I simply don’t know how to see the frontend. And you say we’ll have to wait till May before we can find out info that would take someone knowledgeable with the system 15 mins to put together in a page and a half?

I appreciate the work you’re doing and the potential quality of the product you are offering. Nevertheless you are wasting an awful lot of people’s time by telling them to download magento and expect it to work ‘out of the box’. For those of us who are not programmers but have some technical proficiency the lack of clear explanations is the single greatest barrier to entry for the vast majority of people into the open source movement. Cop on and put together a few pages - say 4 - which will take yourselves between 1 and 2 hours to put together and which outline the system in a way that is useful to what you programmers generally refer to with some contempt as ‘newbies’. Thank you.

please tell me you’re joking. the screencasts themselves should have been more than enough to get you started and ‘see’ your products on the frontend. i am far from an expert programmer and i seem to have no issue figuring it out. its not a big secret!

what exactly are you even looking for? i dont know why you’re hammering on and on about some exact step by step guide when not everyone would even be going through the same steps. not everyone is going to have configurable products. not everyone is going to be using all the various modules included in magento. if you expect someone to write a guide exactly for your needs then think again.

honestly, just go through the screencasts. its not that hard. if you’re still having issues following extremely simple screencasts, then perhaps its time to revisit your own skill set. honestly it sounds like you haven’t even gone through a single wiki article, screencast, knowledgebase or even the multitudes of threads on this very forum.