Magento is basically a Business CMS/Shopping cart application designed to take online businesses to the next level. While on Template Monster I browsed for great eCommerce templates and found the Magento templates to have the look and functionality that I expect for a business. They have a free edition which is limited to basic functionality and then there’s the Enterprise edition which is designed for a mature successful company. The project took a total of 30minutes for me to install including the download from the site. The download was slow for some reason but the rest of the setup was a breeze. Here’s the installation instructions from the site, however before you get started with the install make sure you verify the version of MySQL installed by your host is 4.1.20 or newer. 
Magento Installation Guide
Category: Installation & Setup
Installation
- Please refer to Magento’s system requirementsto 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.
- Downloadthe .zip or .tar.gz file from the Magento website and decompress it.
- 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)
- 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.
- Ensure that the file magento/var/.htaccess, the directories magento/app/etc, magento/var, and all the directories under magento/mediaare 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:
- As a number (eg, 755)
- 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. http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/magento_filesystem_permissions
- 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/.
- 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.
- Success! You’ve completed a basic Magento install. You can now visit the administration backend and begin configuring your new online store.
Once I completed the Installation the first thing I wanted to do was load a few images of the test store and see if it worked. Unfortunately you must crawl before you walk. Which means you must go through the Backend options of the site and modify the settings to meet your business. But for starters it’s best to visit the Knowledge Base page to find answers for most of your questions. If you find the software appealing enough you can pay for the User Guide. It’s inexpensive for a refined application such as Magento. Later I will follow up with my Complete Site Setup but for now here’s a peek at the installation with a sample product.
Sample Product
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Jessie Patterson
May 11, 2011 at 1:10 pmSometimes it is hard to get everything up and running when your doing it all by yourself. This tutorial really helps get you on the right track to getting magento installed and running for you business. If your still having problems even after going through this tutorial I would suggest asking the author for help or it might be worth it to get professional help.