Having installed Magento and had a quick fiddle in the backend (phnarr) as I'm 'one of those poncey designer types' as all my technical chums tell me, I noticed that my test website had the default logo on it ...

... I just wondered how easy it would be to change to one I had made ... turns out the tutorials on this are a bit difficult to follow, so - taking 3 or 4 as a guideline, I achieved the change fairly easily, but thought it best to outline how I did it ....

Apparently (and this is the way I tend to alter logo's on Joomla! templates), many people just locate the default image in the correct folder and replace the logo.gifwith their own, however, this doesn't make for such a good idea if you want to us a jpg or a transparent png ...

So, if you dig a little further, theres a 'proper' way of editing this ...

Step 1 (you find a girl to love ....)

In your Magento admin section, navigate to System then Configuration

This opens a selection of choices, the one of which we need is Design (so far I'm liking the logic and the layout of Magento's admin area) ...

Now click on the header Header - a dropdown panel appears that allows you to edit the path to the image used, its Alt tag and some welcome text ...

Swap these to whatever you need them to be (I've created a png logo that I've called magento-logo.png so thats what I switch the path to) ...

Save your new configuration ...

Some of you will have noticed the obvious mistake I've made - but more on that later .... (nothing to worry about - it can be fixed)

Once you have clicked the button, you should see the following message ...

It worked first time I did it, so if you don't see this message, I'm guessing you might want to check the syntax of your image path :)

So, this is where we get to see my big mistake ... If you now navigate to the front page of your magento install, you get to see your brand new logo ...

... well, you would if you had bothered to ftp it to the server ... dummy!

There was nowhere I could find that told you where the image was to be placed, so I did some digging and I can tell you the image needs to be uploaded to skin/frontend/default/default/images

... now if you navigate to the default page of your store, you'll see your lovely new logo ...

See - all done :)

Now all I have to do is learn everything else there is to know about Magento in a week of evenings :( I give me a fair to middling chance ... all knowledge is good though - you never know when it will come in handy ...

Ok, first off, if you don't have a server running PHP, Magento is not going to work on your web hosting ... that being said, you can install it to a local Windows system running WAMP - which is a version of Apache Server (amongst other things) for Windows ... Its really useful !!! Get it Here

I'm looking for work at the moment, to fill a gap where I'll be sofa hopping and waiting for my visa for Canada, so I've applied for a job administrating a website that uses Magento and I need to fairly quickly learn how it works! ... so that why I find myself needing to install it ... my panic is your free tutorial (better I make those mistakes than you!)

Anyway ... to install Magento - get yourself over to their website http://www.magentocommerce.com/ now find the button with "Download" on it ... we're after the Community Version ... for Community read Free!

When I visited there were a few options (July 2012) - you need to download the Full Release version (as you don't have Magento yet ... if you are upgrading, there are separate packages for this) ...

you will also need to download the Sample Data package ... trust me , these are always the best way to learn how something works ... a blank database might be a thing of pure clean beauty, but its also pretty useless ... why not break stuff that doesn't matter? much better to destroy to build :D

Anyway ..

Once you have these safely on your hard drive, you have to do a little bit of setting up ...

As you are going to install data on a MySql database, you'll need to set one of these up on your hosting ... I'm not going to go into that here ... put ultimately you will probably use phpMyAdmin - so if you don't know how to do this try their website or contact your hosting company ... now make sure you have the usernames and password somewhere safe :D

Once you have your database setup, you'll need to unzip your Sample Data, as there are 2 bits in there you'll need ... open up your phpMyAdmin panel and find the database you just built ... then you can import the data from the .sql file ...

If everything goes to plan, then you should see a fully populated database (apparently this sometimes doesn't work - but was fine whn I did it) ...

... now, before we can do the 2nd part of the Sample Data Install, we have to upload the main code for Magento ...

Unzip the Full Release and open your favourite FTP client ... now, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I seem to have a mental block when it comes to Magento and keep typing it as Magneto (???) so, as I didn't want my test copy of Magento in the root of my test server, you will notice its placed in an odd named folder :)

Anyway, FTP all the files and folders to your server - to the place you want your Magento shop to be!

... though I didn't try it, I'm guessing you could upload the zipped Full release using cPanel and then unzip it when its on the server (maybe put that in my 'to try' folder) ..

Once everything has uploaded, we have to go back to our Sample Data - if you look in your unzipped folder, you will find a folder name 'media' - you'll have to upload the contents of this folder to the 'media' folder already on your server.

... the upload is the 'catalog' folder ...

Now you have the sample data installed, you can setup the installation proper :D

Using your favourite browser (or Internet Explorer if your favourite browser isn't available) open up the home page of your installation ... in my case (as I spelt the folder incorrectly) its http://www.givemeajobsoicanmovetocanada.co.uk/magneto/ - but yours will no doubt be less daft!

Now Magento leads you through the final installation of itself ...

Page 1 is just a bit of legal bumpf ... no doubt you are agreeing to give your first born and you iphone to Beelzebub, but who the hell has time to read this stuff? ... I clicked 'agree' ... no children yet and iphones are cool but overpriced and for fashion nazi's ...

Next Page lets you setup your Local Settings - Time - Language - Currency ...

Keep clicking ... we're on to page 3 ... where you need to fill in those MySql database settings you made a note of earlier ... normally this works first time ... if your settings don't work ... read on ...

... now, lots of hosts have a way of setting up databases that cause problems here ... say you have created your database as 'magento' this seems fair enough ... when you fill in the details for database name as 'magento' however, it fails :( The reason for this is most likely that you are not the only person using the server your hosting is on, and every user has to be individually identified - this is done with a prefix to your database name ... a hosting user name .... so check this before swearing a lot ... so your database will be referred to as dave_magento (the underscore is used with my hosting, I'm guessing its universal) ... you'll also need to prefix the username :D

... I've never come across a setup that didn't work with "localhost" ... so I always leave it and tinker later on!

Next page ...

This is where you setup your admin account - simple enough, follow the instructions :)

... Then we're all done!

Now, all I do is navigate to my admin page and check I can login using the details I set up earlier ...

I'm happy to say I got Magento to install in a fairly easy, hassle free way ... now its time to find out how it performs :D

Things have been panning out pretty well with our move, but I fear that my lack of recent work will mean that although I am learning new things (which is good) I'm unlikely to be offered any work with Magento until I've had a good root around in there!

... Coming as soon as I have a spare hour ... tutorial on changing the default logo in Magento !

Thanks for reading.

i-r-paulus