Magento is confusing.

This little blog is here to chronicle my efforts to configure Magento, an open-source e-commerce web application which I think has lots of promise.

Installing Magento on a LAMP server was pretty easy, as long as you have the very most up to date software. I recommend finding a VPS so you can install what you need at will. But configuring and upgrading functionality in the administrative portion of the site is astoundingly confusing and difficult. The Magento Wiki and Magento Forums offer some degree of help, but ultimately new developers are left to untangle the ./app structure themselves. Magento suffers from spaghetti code syndrome, which I think is a result of trying to impose a very well organized object-oriented structure on top of a scripting language. I think all developers who try to do this run into this problem -- I know I have. And to change functionality unfortunately means editing a zillion pages.