Magento Commerce LogoI am sure I am not the only person who has ever had issues setting up Magento. Magento is an amazing ecommerce system but is not very user friendly on the set up. Previous to trying Magento I was a 8 year user of OSCommerce. I have ran several installations of OSCommerce for my own profit and set up even more for clients. Below are a list of issues and solutions to the issues I had while installing Magento for the first time.

Currently I am still adding to this list so it may update over time.

Error when uploading product images
When attempting to upload product images I received an error titled “Upload HTTP Error”
Solution: You are probably using a mac or linux machine so you need to add 2 lines to the .htaccess file in the root directory of your Magento installation. Insert the following at the bottom of your .htaccess file:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

Permissions:
Magento is a permissions punk. It seems to never be happy, especially if you try to upgrade you can wreck the permissions and never get them back to normal. The day after I installed Magento version 1.3.0 was released, since I had not launched the site live yet, nor did I show what I was working on to my client, I decided to run the update. The first attempt went like this, I uploaded the zip and unpacked it using the SSH unzip command and overwrote all changed files. At first glance that seemed to work just fine but when I loaded up the admin screen the dashboard did not show up and a few of the other components on the back end did not work. My first guess was permissions because I had just came out of a permissions nightmare after trying to setup Magento Connect. After chatting with a couple of guys on Twitter and exhausting every forum suggestion I could find I backed up my theme files and database, erased everything, installed the clean 1.3.0 and applied my database and uploaded the theme files. Everything worked fine from there which was weird because every directory permission I looked at was the same before when the dashboard was not working as it was after I did the reinstall which allows the Magento installation process to set it’s own permissions. If you can’t get something to work, I suggest backing up, start over with a fresh install and apply the changes you made. Before you do anything, Always Back Up! The easiest way to back up is to access your root via. SSH, then type in:

tar -cvf magentobackup.tar ./

More to come…

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