Magento Install: Best Practices

Magento Install

Magento Install is so important to a stable and trouble free experience. So many times we’ve run into what we call “website divorcees;” that is, clients who have had issues with their previous web developers and find us to be a competent enough outfit to help them with their site maintenance going forward. And almost all the time, we run into Magento installs that are simply a rat’s nest of issues, either intentional because of maintenance or neglect, or unintentional, as the web developer wasn’t as well-versed in setting up Magento.

Here are a few basic tips we’ve laid out as a basis for our own Magento install and maintenance jobs that we thought would be helpful for prospective clients to watch out for:

• Magento Install Properly Done. Some people treat a Magento install as they would with a WordPress install, thinking that its all simply a matter of dumping the Magento codebase in a directory, creating an database and running the installer. On the contrary, depending on where the site is hosted, there’s configuration tweaks and other minutae that also need to be taken care of before even deploying a Magento site live. We’ve even run into sites where none of the core files could even talk to each other because the previous developer never bothered to set the permissions of the files to the web server (everything was running under root permissions)!
• Release the clutter! It’s really hard to troubleshoot or even upgrade a Magento install that has unrelated files sitting inside the public HTML folders. Oftentimes we’ve seen Magento installs with static HTML files because the previous web developer wasn’t aware that Magento has a fairly robust CMS editor. Or we’ll see a “images” folder when images can simply be called from the “media” or “skin” directories with CMS directives.
• Keep the site updated. Seriously—it’s 2014. No Magento site should be kept stuck on version 1.4 or less, yet all the time we see even very large operations still chugging along on legacy versions of the software.
• Rotate your log files! Or better yet, disable them on a perfectly-functioning production site. You don’t need Authorize.net logs taking up 5GB of space on your web servers and logging every single transaction. Not only does it eat up precious server space and bandwidth, but its also a security hole as you have customer names, addresses, and the last four digits of their credit cards sitting around for anyone with basic knowledge of the /var/log directory to peek at!

So there you have it, just some basic maintenance notes for your entertainment and education. Hope this helps, and if you’re having a Magento maintenance monster run amok on your business, give us a call or shoot us a message.