The archive file is available in (.zip) (38 MB), .tar.gz (37 MB), and .tar.bz2 (36MB) formats to download (the files contain exactly the same content inside and are provided in different formats just for your convenience).

Each archive contains a SQL script that should be applied on a clean database with your database management tool (phpMyAdmin or whatever you use), and a ‘media’ folder with sample product images that you should copy to your Magento media folder.

You should then run the regular installation process as you would for a complete package. Please make sure that you have exactly the same version of Magento that the sample data is provided for 1.0.19870.

Please also backup all your data and keep separately any custom changes on the files you did, because they may not be compatible with the sample data provided.

The archive file is available in (.zip) (38 MB), .tar.gz (37 MB), and .tar.bz2 (36MB) formats to download (the files contain exactly the same content inside and are provided in different formats just for your convenience).

Each archive contains a SQL script that should be applied on a clean database with your database management tool (phpMyAdmin or whatever you use), and a ‘media’ folder with sample product images that you should copy to your Magento media folder.

You should then run the regular installation process as you would for a complete package. Please make sure that you have exactly the same version of Magento that the sample data is provided for – 1.0 with Revision 19700.

Please also backup all your data and keep separately any custom changes on the files you did, because they may not be compatible with the sample data provided.

Varien would like to note that we do not support any upgrade functionality until the stable version of Magento is released. We recommend to make a fresh installation after every new version release. We cannot guarantee that any customization done on the preview version will work for the stable version.

How will it work in Magento 1.0?

Module and package management is in the works. After the module distribution engine will be finalized it will provide web admin interface for upgrades and adding new modules/packages.

All your modifications will be made as a local module that override existing modules functionality.
You would not touch nor overwrite existing code, so that future updates are possible. In your customization module’s configuration you would specify which models, blocks, controllers, templates, etc. you will replace or extend.

Still want to upgrade your preview version? – This is how it should be done now

In case and despite of the things mentioned above you still want to upgrade to the next beta preview version but avoid reinstalling it completely, do the following:

• Backup your database
• Backup all the code you modified yourself, don't forget to keep the original installation archive
• Take care of saving media directory that contains all the uploaded product/category images
• Create a backup copy of app/etc/local.xml file

Download a new installation archive or run SVN update if you checked it out from Magento repository.

• Extract and upload all the files it contains to your server
• Delete var/cache and var/session directories
• Point your browser to any Magento page
• Database upgrades should happen automatically

* All the module versions are stored in `core_resource` table per module, and if these versions are lower than ones in the code, Magento will look for these update files and apply them, updating current version of modules in the database. Every time configuration cache is created it is validating the version of db structure for each module against the value in configuration. If it differs it runs necessary upgrade files.

What may be affected ?

Check for the data you had before in your installation. Pay close attention to system configuration settings and the features announced to be changed in the new release.
Then review the files you have changed yourself and put any required changes in the updated installation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that until the stable version release the only recommended way to upgrade to a newer version is to make a fresh install.

Summary

We will look into adding module/package managent by the end of the year. A lot of documentation on upgrade process will be available as well.

Thank you.

1. Please refer to Magento's system requirements to ensure you have the appropriate platform and environment set up. If you attempted to install Magento and the installation wizard suggested to use the PHP-CGI workaround, please click here.
2. Download the .zip or .tar.gz file from the Magento website and decompress it.
3. Upload the Magento web files to your web server via FTP (if you have SSH access and are comfortable with the command line, check out this wiki post)
4. Create a MySQL database and user/password for Magento This step varies by hosting provider and is out of the scope of this document. Consult your provider's support/documentation for instructions on how to do this.
5. Ensure that the file magento/var/.htaccess, the directories magento/app/etc, magento/var, and all the directories under magento/media are writable by the web server. To do so, navigate to the directory with your FTP client. Then locate the function "Change Permissions" or "Change Mode" in your FTP client and select it. Once you find the function, you must set the permissions so the web server can write to this file. There are two typical ways of representing file permissions in Linux:
   1. As a number (eg, 755)
   2. As a series of permissions categorized into user, group, and other

If your FTP client uses the first representation, set the permissions on each directory to be 777, or 0777. If your FTP client uses the second representation, set the permissions as shown in the image below.


6. Use your web browser to surf to the Magento installation wizard. If you've uploaded the Magento files to http://www.example.com/magento/, then the wizard will be located here: http://www.example.com/magento/install/.
7. Once in the wizard, you can configure various system-level settings that are required for Magento to function. Most options will be intelligently guessed for you, but you're free to override any settings that don't look right. At the very least, change the database parameters in the first box “Database connection” to match those of the database you set up in Step 3.
8. Success! You've completed a basic Magento install. You can now visit the administration backend and begin configuring your new online store.
9. UPDATE: If you have installed Version 1.0.19700, you should follow the instructions to install the patch which fixes a known issue with the compare products feature.

Known Issues

Magento was developed on Linux and as such, it is most tested on this platform. Here are some known issues that may result from the use of other operating systems.

1. Under Windows, image uploads do not work at this time. As a result, an administrator will not be able to upload product images.

UPDATE: Please use the Magento Install / Setup Forum to report and discuss installation issues.

Let’s start with creating a simple 10% coupon.

We first enter a rule name and description. Once those are in we select Active for Status.

You then need to select which Website the coupon will be good for. In this case we want to give customers in all stores the benefit of the 10 percent off discount, so we select all options for the Websites and the customer groups. You select multiple items by holding Ctrl while selecting.

We are then going to make the Rule applied only with a coupon code, so we enter our code. If a code is not entered the rule will take effect once the customer reaches the cart without any action taken.

Now we have Uses Per Coupon and Uses Per Customer. In this case we want to create a sense of urgency, so the coupon can only be used 100 times. We then set the Users Per Customer to 1, so each customer will only be able to use the coupon once.

We then enter the dates the coupon is valid for and select the priority of the coupon. In this case we keep the priority as 0, the highest priority. If you remember from the Catalog Price Rules, the priority is used when you have 2 Rules applying to the same products. The rule with the highest priority (lowest number) will take effect first.

You can also decide whether or not each individual price rule will be made public in the price rules RSS feed that your customers can sign up for.

We are going to skip Conditions and come back to it since we are creating a simple coupon here. If this is skipped, the coupon will apply to all carts where the coupon code is entered. The products in the cart will not need to meet any conditions. To complete this coupon we select Actions from the left navigation.

Select Percent of Product Price discount (the other options being Fixed amount discount, Fixed amount discount for whole cart, and Buy X get Y free) and enter the value you want to discount. In this case it is 10.

We then want to enter a value for the maximum qty the discount will be applied to. Since we enter 5 here, the 6th product (must be the same item) will not have the discount applied, only the first 5 will receive the 10 percent discount.

The Discount Qty Step controls how often the discount is applied. If we were to enter 8 here, the 10 percent discount would only apply after 8 items are added to the cart. If more than 8 items were added to the cart, the discount would remain as 10% or 8 items, until 16 items were added to the cart, at which point the discount would become 10% of 16 items. This would continue for every factor of 8. This would be useful for sellers who sell items in packages of 8 and only want to give discounts to each group of 8 items. In this case, we do not sell our items this way, so we will leave is field blank.

You can also elect to combine the coupon amount with a free shipping offer, either just for the products the coupon is valid for, or for the whole order if one of those products is present in the cart. We aren’t feeling that generous in this case though, so we keep this dropdown at No.

Finally we stop further rules from taking effect on the products in this Rule. This means that if one of the products also had another Shopping Cart Discount Rule set up it would not take effect because this rule has the higher priority.

If we were to set this value to No other rules could take effect. For example, if we had a buy 2 get 1 free coupon for one of the items set up to take effect without a coupon it could then take effect after we discounted the first 2 by 10%.

Now that we have the coupon information entered we can move and select which products the coupon is valid for.

In this case we are going to have the coupon valid on all products, so we will leave this section blank. If we wanted to specify this coupon to apply only to certain products, however, we could generate a set of conditions which the products must match in order to have the discount applied to them.

Now we select Save Rule and our 10% coupon is set to go, ready to be mailed in your newsletter and begin generating sales.

Now that we set up a simple rule based coupon, let’s look at how to create more complicated Rules using the Conditions. This works similarly to the conditions we can can create to specify to which products the coupon will apply.

The advanced Conditions provide a lot of flexibility, letting you look at values besides just selecting products. Let’s use the Advanced Conditions to set up a Buy 2 get 1 Free promotion.

In this case we are trying to push a digital camera, a family deal if you will. So we set up the Coupon Information as we did last time. In this case we will leave the coupon code field blank, meaning the discount will take effect once the customer adds the products to their cart.

We want to create the deal for the Argus QC-2185 Quick Click 5MP Digital Camera. We go to the Conditions, where we will set up the rules for the product to take effect.

We want 2 conditions to be true, the product must be the Argus QC-2185 Quick Click 5MP Digital Camera and the quantity in the cart must be 3, so we set the conditions to take effect as shown above. We then move to create our first condition, that the product will be this camera. In this case we will use the SKU of the camera.

We then want to set up our quantity rule. We are going to set the rule up so that people buying 3 or more will get one free, so we select equals or greater than.

We now move to the Actions to complete the Buy 2 Get 1 Free deal.

We set the discount at a Fixed Amount and enter the discount amount, $34.90. We then set the maximum quantity discount is applied to to 3, leave free shipping and the further rules processing as they are. Because this is a one time fixed amount discount, it does not need to be restricted so that it applies only to certain products, so we will leave the bottom section blank. If we did need to restrict this rule, however, we would establish the conditions here much like those established in the Conditions tab. When we are finished, we will select Save Rule. Now just send out your marketing message telling customers that if they Buy Argus QC-2185 Quick Click 5MP Digital Cameras one of them will be free.

To set this up go to System -> Configuration and select Payment Methods from the left navigation. Once there you will see Saved CC as one of the available methods.

To enable this option you will want to set the Enabled dropdown to Yes.

You can change the Title of the method to whatever you like in the Title field.

Below this you can set the preferences of this payment method just as you do with all other payment methods. This includes the status of new orders placed with this method, the sort order as it will appear in the front-end in relation to the other methods, whether your customers must enter a card verification number, and the country and order amount filters for your customer to be able to use this method.

When you are finished, select the Save Config button and you will be able to accept credit cards without integrating with a payment gateway.

Orders placed using this method will appear in the admin with the card number, name on card and expiration date displayed to the store owner. You can then take this information and use it to charge your customers using your preferred method.

To create a Catalog Price Rule go to Promotions -> Catalog Price Rules and select Add New Rule.

The first thing to do is enter a Name and Description for the catalog price rule. Once that is set up we will Enable it by selecting Active from the Status dropdown.

You then select which Websites to apply the rule to. In this case we will enact the rule for all Websites.

You are then able to select which Customer Groups you want the rule to apply to. The first option is Not Logged In, those customers who are not signed in to any account, and therefore not assigned to a customer group. In this case we will also offer the discount to the General and Retailer customer groups.

We are also setting a date range for the Rule to take effect. If you leave the date range empty the rule will be enabled as soon as it is created.

You will also set the priority on this page. The priority is there in case a product has two separate Catalog Price Rules. Whichever has the priority (1 being the most priority) will take effect. We will discuss priority after creating another rule.

Once you have set up the information for the product you create the conditions for the Rule. In this case we are going to discount every Sony product which is $100 or more by 15%.

Now here is how we do it:

If you are going to create a rule which requires 2 conditions (as we are doing here, the product must be in apparel and the price must be over $50) select ‘If All these Conditions are True’. If we wanted the discount to take effect if the product was a Sony product OR if the product was over $50 we would select ‘Any’.

Select Product Attribute from the dropdown (we will get to conditions combination in a bit) and select the Default Category from the list of attributes. We then want the middle rule to be is and we then enter the name of the manufacturer in the field, giving us this:

So the rule will now apply to all products whose manufacturer is Sony; but we want to further limit this to only those products which are $100 and over. Open a new Condition and select Product Attribute. From the attribute list select Price, and then select ‘equals or greater than’ from the condition dropdown. We then enter the value, 100.00, and we have our second condition created.

Now that we have the Conditions set we need to create the Actions.

The Apply dropdown allows you to decide whether the discount is a percentage or a fixed amount, and whether the discount amount will be subtracted from the original price (By) or whether the discount amount will be the actual final price (To). For this case select select By Percentage of the original price and we then enter our value, 15. This will give a final price that is a 15% reduction of the original price. To select To Percentage of the original price would give a final price that is equal to 15% of the original price (an 85% reduction). The last thing to do is decide whether we want to stop other rules from taking effect on the products we have selected. In this case we will select Yes. Now, remember the priority we entered on the last page? This is what decides which rules are applied first.

In this case we entered the priority as 1. Say we had another rule, $5 off all products, which had a priority of 2. If we had selected No on the Stop Further Rules Processing dropdown that $5 discount would take effect on the already 15% discounted price. Since we select yes the $5 discount will still apply to other products, but not Sony products equal or great than $100.

Now we select Save Rule and the rule is created. What’s that Save Rule and Apply button you ask? Well, I’m glad you did.

You may also notice that there is a Apply Rules button on the list of Catalog Price Rules. For the rule to change the price of the items selected you will either need to select Save Rule and Apply, or the Apply Rules button on the list of Catalog Price Rules. The reasoning behind this is that as you add new rules, the system must recalculate the prices and the priorities of the rules. The rules are applied each night automatically, but if you do want to immediately apply a new rule you must select one of the Apply buttons. Now the Sony Products equal or greater than $100 are discounted by 15%.

Now on to some increased functionality. I promised I would talk about Condition Combinations and I will do so here.

Let’s switch examples to discounting apparel. White is the new color and you have an overstock of all your Red and Black clothing. You want to discount it, but don’t want to go through and create 2 different rules. Here is where Condition Combinations shine.

We start our first line with All the Conditions being True.

Now when we go to set up our first condition we select Conditions Combination from the dropdown. We then need to set up the conditions below as being Any, since we are going to discount products which are either Black or Red.

At this point the Conditions look like this:

Now we set up the other option, if the Color is Red and we have this:

Now that we have set up our Condition for the colors we move back to the first level of conditions and select the price as being equal to or greater than $20.00 and we see this:

Now we need all the conditions to be true. The price must be equal to or greater than $20 and the color must be either Black or Red.  Apply your actions as described above, Save and Apply the Rule and that overstock will be moving out of the warehouse in no time.

One of Magento’s advanced features allows for management of multiple websites and stores within one installation, and we have an amazing system to support this:  GWS - aka “Global, Website, Store.”

• Global: This refers to the entire installation.
• Website: Websites are ‘parents’ of stores.  A website consists of one or more stores. Websites can be set up to share customer data, or not to share any data
• Store (or store view group): Stores are ‘children’ of websites.  Products and Categories are managed on the store level.  A root category is configured for each store view group, allowing multiple stores under the same website to have totally different catalog structures.
• Store View: A store needs one or more store views to be browse-able in the front-end.  The catalog structure per store view will always be the same, it simply allows for multiple presentations of the data in the front.  90% of implementations will likely use store views to allow customers to switch between 2 or more languages.

Example scenario

Let’s say you want to sell appliances, consumer electronics, and DVD’s and CD’s.  For the purpose of this example we’ll separate the catalog into two stores and three websites.  The appliance line will be sold on its own website, and the remaining items on another website.  You bought appliances.com and coolstuff.com for this purpose.  You don’t want customer data and order data to be shared between the two websites, so data sharing will be turn off in the configuration between them.

Under coolstuff.com you create two stores - Electronics, and Media.  Consumer electronics will be sold through the electronics store, and the media items through the Media store.  Since each line of items is very extensive, it makes sense to create a separate category structure for the Media store and the Electronics store… otherwise the category tree would be large and cumbersome.  When the stores are created, you simply assign a different root category to each store.

In addition, you want to feature your catalog for both websites in English and Spanish.  To do this, you will create an English and Spanish store view for each of the three stores.  When entering catalog data you can switch store views in the admin to create the additional product titles, descriptions etc…

Configuration

The configuration of Magento uses GWS as a kind of tree when setting up the stores.  When it is initially installed, all configuration settings point to “default”, meaning the global installation.  A check box next to each configurable item can be un-checked in a particular website or store view, to indicate that this item will be specific to this website or store view.  For example, you will offer authorize.net as a payment module on both websites, but you only want to offer google checkout on coolstuff.com.  In the configuration, you’d select coolstuff.com in the store view drop-down, find the google API settings, and un-check “use default” in the google checkout tab.  For this specific website you can now enable or disable google checkout.

All modules in the configuration function the same way.

Moving on to store views - after a store view has been created, you can configure the layout and visual settings of the store view however you’d like - a drop-down allows customers to switch between store views.  This will reload the current page with the alternate view.  This can be used for multiple languages, but can also be a way to easily do A-B testing between several design packages to see if one yields more conversions.  The possibilities are endless!

The above is meant as a basic overview of this functionality - the best way to learn how to set it all up is to install Magento and get in there and start playing around.

I also created two short videos that go into a little more detail regarding the configuration.  Enjoy!
Video: Creating Multiple Online Storefronts, Part 1
Video: Creating Multiple Online Storefronts, Part 2

Layered navigation constant filters

In Magento, two properties will appear as layered navigation filters without you having to do anything:  Price and Categories.  If you make a category an anchor category, its sub-categories will display as layered navigation options.  If you take a look at the image above, you’ll notice the first filter is Category and it features two options:  Shirts and Pants.  In this example, Shirts and Pants are subcategories of the category this layered navigation block was pulled from.

Price ranges are also logically picked to display as another filter.  The ranges themselves are determined by the prices of products contained within.  There will never be more than 10 price ranges displayed, and products will be distributed accordingly.

Additional layered navigation filters

The additional filters in the screenshots above are Color and Manufacturer.  These are product attributes that have been selected as filterable in the Use in Layered Navigation dropdown. There are two types of filterable attributes. Filterable (with results) means that links will only appear for values where the number of results (the number in parentheses next to each value) is greater than zero. Filterable (no results) means that links will appear for all values, whether the number of results is zero or greater. In order for an attribute to appear as a layered navigation filter, the Catalog Input Type for Store Owner must be Dropdown, Multiple Select, or Price.  This controls the number of possible filter options, and makes them consistent.

There are three kinds of products in Magento: Simple, Grouped, and Configurable.  If you want to make a simple product, they are covered in detail in the “Creating products” tutorial.

Advanced Products

Advanced products in Magento are a way to consolidate product variants onto a single product info page in the front-end.  The variants themselves have their own SKUs and stock management.  This is very powerful - it allows you to let customers search for the individual variants, but browse only to the consolidated product pages.  (If it’s the implementation you want - you could also let customers browse the individual SKUs.)

Grouped Products display several products on one page.  For example - if you’re selling chef’s knives and you have the same knife in four sizes, you can make a grouped product to display all four sizes.  Customers can select the size(s) they want and add to cart from this page.  Another example would be a themed bedroom set - you can create a grouped product and sell the sheets, comforter, and pillow cases all from the same page.

Creating a Grouped Product

There are a few steps involved:

1. Create the invidivual products you want to sell on the Grouped Product page
2. Create the grouped product itself
3. Add the individual products to this grouped product

Creating the individual products

Before adding anything to the grouped product, you have to create the individual products you want to sell from the grouped product page.  For our example, we’re going to use Chef’s knives.  Let’s say you have 4 chef’s knives of the same manufacturer and series, and want to sell them all on one page - customers can add whichever of the set they want to cart.

1. Navigate to Catalog -> Manage Products
2. Click on “Add Product”
3. Select “Simple Product”, use whichever attribute set you need for the product.  For this example, the Default attribute set was fine - we aren’t using any attributes besides the system attributes.
4. Do whatever data entry you desire for each simple product to be in the Grouped product. Below is what the General tab looks like for one of our knives:


5. When you’re done with data entry for the product, press “Save”.
6. Now repeat steps 2-4 for each product you will sail through the Grouped Product. You can also use the Duplicate Product feature to create the 4 seperate products without having to enter every value 4 times. Once you have created and saved your first product select the Duplicate button on the product page in the admin panel. The duplicate product will not copy unique values, such as SKU, as you need to edit these anyway. The duplicate product will be created with a status of disabled.

Creating the Grouped Product

1. Navigate to “Catalog -> Manage Products”
2. Click “Add Product”
3. Select “Grouped Product” for the product type.  We’re still OK with the default attribute set.
4. On the general tab for the Grouped Product, you’ll notice a few fields are missing: Weight and Qty.  These don’t make sense when applied to Grouped products, since the weights and quantities are determined by the individual products:


5. There’s also an additional tab:  Associated Products.  This is where you will add the individual knives you just created to this Grouped Product.  Let’s click on that tab now.
6. If you type “Chef’s” into “Name” and hit “Search” you should find the 4 chef’s knives you just created.


If you check an item, it gets added to the grouped product.  When checked, two fields unlock:  Default Qty and Position.  You can control the sort order of the items in the Position field. As with all sort orders in Magento, the product with the lowest number will have the highest position on the page. You can also enter a default quantity which will be a pre-populated value in the front-end qty box.

Grouped Products in the Front-end

Below is how the grouped product will appear in the front-end:

As you can see, the Position and Default Quantity fields reflect the information entered in the admin.