Magento is a powerful e-commerce platform but has gained a reputation as being quite a bit of complicated kit. One area which has bugged me, is the static blocks and XML handles that you can use to create your own blocks of content.

In this post I will take you through the various steps to help you install Magento locally on your computer (iMac). To get started we need to make sure we have the following items to begin the installation process, this really only includes MAMP (helps install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X!) and Magento. Follow the steps below and you can get Magento up and running within ten minutes.