Ecommerce — people love it, but whenever possible I’ll pass it off onto an existing system; make my money skinning it, and avoid any responsibility for issues that may arise. And, to be honest, unless something very different from the usual is required, learning to use an existing system is probably much more cost-effective than having one custom build specifically for ease of use.

Magento Commerce is the system I tend toward. I’ve installed it three times, on dreamhost servers, and not once without incident. Dreamhost and the Magento installer bicker and spit in a manner similar to fueding kittens well versed in human language.

It was on the third occasion that I realized I really had no idea how I’d successfully installed the first two. Frustrating, but we can avoid that in times to come with this very post.

Installing Magento 1.2.1.2 on Dreamhost

Problems arise during the table creation phase of the Magento install. For some reason, the script appears to run more than once — maybe it’s timing out?

And, oh man, does Magento ever not like the idea of creating tables that already exist — tables that it created seconds earlier.

Guys, it was being completely unreasonable, and moreover sometimes we totally just know better than other people or in this situation programs.

The trick is making them do what we want. In this situation, I modified the SQL in app/code/core/Mage/Sales/sql/sales_setup/mysql4-install-0.9.0.php.

Using find/replace, I swapped all instances of CREATE TABLE with the more dreamhost-friendly CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS.

And with that, the installer thought the words “oh, these tables already exist. Sweet, I don’t even have to do anything now.” More appealing to us than the “Oh god there are already tables here what is going on???” and its ensuing panic attack which came before our alterations.