E-Commerce is getting big, and one of the biggest e-commerce systems in use is Magento. It is an open source software package that allows users to set up an online store. While “easy” isn’t the first word I would use for Magento, it’s certainly one of the better options out there if you’re looking for a professional e-commerce solution.

As a designer, developing themes for Magento might be something you would like to look into. But, unlike installing WordPress on XAMPP, Magento’s installation procedures can be a bit intimidating, especially for a designer who just wants to get it working so they can start developing themes and other pretty things. Where WordPress is the darling of the 5 minute installation, Magento takes a little coaxing to work. Here’s a step-by-step procedure that will hopefully save you a headache. Please note that I run XAMPP, so this tutorial is written for XAMPP only and is Windows 7 specific.

For this tutorial, I am running the following:
XAMPP 1.8.1
Apache 2.4.3
MySQL 5.5.27
PHP 5.4.7
Magento Community 1.7.0.0

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