So, Installing Magento on WAMP was a painful process, I gave up and switched to Zend Server as my server option as I am currently running on Windows 7.

Let me get one thing straight. Installing magento isn’t as easy as they stated in their ‘step-by-step’ guide. Well, especially on an Zend set-up.

Therefore, I will list the things I discovered you had to do to get this “amazing eCommerce Solution” to install on my local server.

The Hidden Steps

• Firstly, you’ll need to copy your magento folder to your apache folder (assuming you’ve installed it) which is located (on my machine) C:\Program Files\Zend\Apache2\htdocs
• Right click on this folder and untick “Read Only”, hit Apply/OK
• Within your magento directory, lies a file called “mage”. Open this in Microsoft Wordpad (notepad doesn’t recognize the linebreaks), or any other editor that doesn’t suck
• You’ll see a line near the top mentioning the php bin directory. Make this MAGE_PHP_BIN=”C:\Program Files\Zend\ZendServer\bin”. Remove the hash and again, relative to where YOU installed your copy of ZEND
• Edit your hosts file (Start->Run “notepad.exe %windir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts“) and put the desired URL for your website such as localhost.com. Example: 127.0.0.1 mymagentosite.com
• Go to phpMyAdmin and create a database, a user and assign all privileges to this user.
• Now, the fun part, go to the URL you entered into your hosts file where magento is stored. In our case, http://mymagentosite.com/magento
• Complete the required fields, enter all the database info correctly and you should be set.
• If you get a timeout error, you might need to edit your php.ini file and up the max_execution_time to around 180 as well as mysql.connect_timeout to -1

Hopefully this helps. I may have missed a step, if so, let me know if you even bother to read this blog. But I know one day, someone will, as Magento looks promising, minus their tricky installer.

Happy Coding.