I swear I can read. Seriously. No, I know some of you may not believe me, but I can. Yeah, sure. Lets go with that.

Wanting to investigate how a popular extension implemented certain functionality, I decided to install the extension on a new Magento dev environment:

Immediately thought I had broken PHP or PEAR in my environment. Then at the root Magento directory, I tried:

and got this error:

I nearly panicked at this point. I started checking file permissions, checking versions…yeah, general panic.

Of course, if you aren’t completely dim-witted like me and actually read the message, you’d see the problem:

Ohhh. Magento is configured to only accept stable extensions, and Foo_Bar is designated alpha.

Obviously, a quick fix. In the admin backend, go to System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager -> Settings and change Preferred State to Alpha or whatever your extension is:

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Anyone who works a lot on the same platform for different customers goes through the process of creating a base install. The base install should be configured so it can be dropped in somewhere easily, and it should just work.

Setting up the base install is not always easy. What happens if there are updates to the platform? How do deal with development environments versus production environments (think domains, logging, etc). How do you migrate data?

While all good questions, all those issues can be scripted out and handled. There will be tricky edge cases and lots of if-then or case/switch statements, but all doable.

To jump into solving whatever business problem you are working on, you usually need to have some sample data to tinker with. Take Magento for instance. Say you want to change what the product pages display. Gotta have some products in the database or you have to create new ones every time you start working with a new client.

Magento has sample data that can be loaded, but its not obvious how it should be loaded. The sample data needs to be loaded before going through the Magento installation wizard.

So the first step is to download the Magento code. Unzip/untar it in /var/www or wherever the web server can access it. Then create a database.

If you have already gone through the Magento installation process, you need to get rid of all the existing data: drop all the tables in your database and delete app/etc/local.xml (this is where the database access information is stored).

Now lets grab the sample data. Its available on the same page where you download Magento itself: http://www.magentocommerce.com/download. Scroll down a bit and download to your local machine.

Untar/unzip the file. You should see a directory and a file:

The contents of the media directory should be copied into media directory of your Magento install, so afterwards your Magento media directory should contain a catalog directory.

Next, the sample data needs to be inserted into the database. If phpMyAdmin is installed, do an import into the database with the downloaded SQL file.

Now go through the Magento installation wizard and you should have products show up on the frontend of the site when you are done.

Problems?

• Sample data images not showing up on frontpage – This is a permissions issue. If you downloaded the sample data media and moved it to the Magento directory, make sure the media and its sub-directories are owned by the same user who owns the Magento directory. Also make sure to turn off caching and deleting all caches while testing the fix.
• Admin user can’t login into backend – See my post Magento: Can’t Login after Installation Fix.

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