If you are about to install Magento CMS, this blog post will come in handy to you. Magento is a new product, but already growing very quickly in users and features. And yet it’s free to download.

Magento comes in two flavors: Light and Full. Full version is much larger and includes sample data like stores, categories, products, images and others, whereas Light version doesn’t. This installation guide will show how to install Magento with simple data.

Step 1. Download the latest Magento package from their official website.

Pay attention that you follow all server requirements. For example, Magento is not compatible with MySQL 4; it needs MySQL 5 to run properly.

Step 2. Upload the Magento web files to your web server via FTP. You may also do it through cPannel -> File Manager.

You can either put Magento file under the public_html folder or a sub folder. In the first case your website will be accessible directly through your domain. Once you have uploaded the package, extract it using cPannel.

Step 3. Set file permissions. As it is a full version of Magento, we need to set the following folders and the directories in the folder “media” to writable mode. 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.

You may do the same via cPannel: login to the cPanel for your domain and click on the File Manager icon under the Files Selection. Make sure that a Show Hidden file is selected. Then check the checkboxes next to files and folders to set the permissions.

Step 4. Create a MySQL database and user/password for Magento. (cPanel -> MySQL Databases. Remember the database details, since you will need them during the script installation.)

Step 5. Use your web browser to surf to the Magento installation wizard.

Step 6. Configure the database connection. Enter the database details: Database Name, User Name and User Password. You can leave the other options intact.
Click on the check box next to “Skip Base URL validation before next step”.

Step 7. After clicking the “Continue” button, enter the personal information and the admin login details you want to use. You can leave the encryption key field empty. The script will generate one for you.

Step 8. Sample data installation.
- open your database with the PhpMyAdmin tool or some other database management tool and drop all tables (sometimes there could be some errors and you’ll need to drop some tables manually one by one)
- then import the dump.sql file from the “sources/sample_data” folder of your template package
- then access the magento root on your server, go to “app/etc” folder and delete local.xml file
- then open your magento website in your browser and you’ll see the initial Magento installation page – reinstall the Magento website once again.

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The installation is completed. Well done!