Exploring Magento
Magento’s administrative interface gives you control over all the standard features of
your shopping cart site. Looking at this backend interface can shed some light on
what features Magento has to offer. Login to the backend with the admin account
which you setup during the installation and you will see something.
Figure 3.1
Magento provides standard functionality that you would expect from any shopping
cart, including:
• Multiple category trees
• Definable attributes
• Customer and customer groupmanagement
• Discount rules for promotions
• Newsletter management
• Web page manager
• Order review system
• Reporting features
• System configuration and settings
In addition to these features, there are a number of features that would not be provided
by default in other shopping carts. A short list of these impressive features
include:
• Reviewing search terms
• Reviewing customer tags
• Poll manager
• Currency exchange rates
• Google Sitemap integration
• Abandoned shopping cart report
• Layered category navigation
None of these features by themselves are probably that impressive. But to have a
system in which they are all present, by default, with no plugins necessary, is truly a
breath of fresh air in the open source e-commerce arena.
By now, you’ve probably “clicked” around in the backend a little. The remainder
of this chapter will guide you through the basics of what Magento has to offer and
cover Magento specific terms. It is necessary to have a thorough understanding of
Magento’s basic operation in order to better understand the code. Let’s start with
Magento’s product catalog.