Today I’m going to install a Magento locally using MAMP PRO in my MacBook.

Note: for Windows users use XAMPP.

1. Set up a new enviroment in MAMP PRO

Its not difficult to install new magento themes,  but many of the people confused about setting default magento theme.

First – Let me explain, How to set any new theme as default theme.

e.g   The directory structure for magento templates and layout is  “app/design/frontend/” then there is package name “default” or “blank” or “anything you have as package ”

You can set this package from admin panel

System -> Configuration -> Design -> Package.

(In magento there is “default” so leave it as it is if your package is “default”)

Now in our product we provide theme for default package so you do not have to change package, you just have to set theme.

What is Magento? Magento is an open source ecommerce platform designed to empower online businessmen and to remove barriers in business process and flow.

Magento is an online shop cart solution that offers a wide range of out of the box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly, quickly and efficiency with ease, and is available as an open source based solution.

Because it has been downloaded more than 600,000 times, perhaps it’s the fastest growing ecommerce solution in the market today. Magento looks and acts like the best of commercial solution, yet it is free to download.

It depends on a theme based structure that separates layouts, templates and skins. Once one gets familiar with Magento’s themes works, creating a store or even several stores becomes easy.

Well you’ve finally decided you’re going to switch to Magento for building ecommerce website. While new versions of Magento coming up regularly make the learning curve easier to climb, be prepared for at least a few days before you can use magento’s features to its best. This article explains the few tricks and tips that will start you off with variations on the basic design of magento’s default installation.

The first thing to do after you’ve installed Magento is to check out the files in skin/frontend/default : you won’t find much here except the stylesheet and a few images.

1) Download Sample Data zip file from Magento Website

2) Extract the zip file

3) Drop all the tables from your magento database. It would be easy to drop the magento database and then recreate it instead of dropping individual tables.

4) Import sample data sql file into your magento database.

# Remember that, you have to drop all tables from your magento database before importing the sample sql file. You will get error afterward if you import the sample data without dropping tables from your magento database. Therefore, step 3 is important.