Overview of the Magento admin

- [Instructor] Now that we have our Magento site installed, let's take a cursory look at the backend. We're just going to gloss over everything to get a feel for where things are, and then we'll come back to each item in more detail later. So don't worry if you don't absorb everything here. This is mostly just an overview. To login to the backend of the site, you need to navigate to the admin URL that was given to you when you installed Magento, or when you had Magento installed for you by your web host, depending on what method you used and your situation. If you have forgotten your admin URL, then you can find that in your file system. If you go to your site's root directory in the app directory, then the Etsy directory, if you open up this env.php file, it'll be here near the top where it says backend array frontName. This text in layman's terms, that's the path that you'll go to to access the backend of your site as an administrator. So you'll go to yourdomain/this if you've forgotten what it is. Usually, it looks slightly different from what I have here. In some cases it'll be something more like admin_ and then six random characters. This is especially if you've done a manual installation. Whatever your admin URL happens to be, go there, and then of course use your login credentials and sign in. And this is what you'll see the first time you login to the backend of your site. See some basic information, a side bar where you can go to lots of different things, and of course $0 lifetime sales and all that, because we have just installed this. This is a brand new site with no information, no sales yet. Let's just walk through some of these. Once again to get a feel for what everything is and where everything is. Of course this is our dashboard, with very broad basic information. If we click Sales, then we have a few options here. This as you can probably guess is all sales information. You can click on Orders for instance, and see all of the orders that have taken place on your website. Of course we don't have any right now, and you could do the same for all of these other things. Invoices, shipments, whatever it is that you want information for. If you click on Products, then you have two options. Catalog and Categories. Let's click on Catalog. This part of the backend is where you add products to your store to sell. This is obviously going to be crucial to your store. This is where you create things, and allow people to purchase them. You'll have them displayed somewhere on the front end of the site sometime. And then of course with Categories, that's where you'll setup categories for the products in your catalog. If you click on Customers, then you can view all customers. This is pretty self-explanatory and also kind of similar to sales. It's just where you can get information about customers who have ordered things from your website. Let's look at Marketing. In Marketing, probably the most important things here are everything in these two left columns. You can set catalog price rules, and cart price rules. This will allow you to alter the prices of things based on certain rules that you setup. Of course you have email templates, newsletter templates for communications. Again, marketing related communications. But we won't neglect this stuff over here either. SEO & Search, these are of course search engine optimization related things, as well as information for where you can view user reviews. Content is another important part of your site. We have three main elements here as you can see. First there's Pages. There is where you can just setup various pages and various types of pages on your website. You have Blocks. Blocks are smaller pieces of information, usually in the form of visual blocks in various places on your site that you determine, like the side bar for instance. And Widgets are like blocks that display dynamic information, information that changes or that lists things based on whatever rules you put in place. Rather than the more static information that blocks usually consist of. Down here under Design, we have Configuration. This is where you set a lot of the website's properties. We'll dig into that very shortly. Themes, where you can change the look of your website, and Schedule, which allows you to schedule design changes on your site to take place automatically, such as the case where you might want an alternative design to show up on your site for a season change, or for a sale period, or something like that. Next we have Reports. This is also fairly self-explanatory. This will give you lots of information on just about any aspect of your store. See we can get more customer information, product information, more sales information, more marketing information. If you're looking at informatics and metrics and wanting to figure things out as far as that aspect of your operation goes, Reports is going to be a very helpful area for you to look at. If we click on Stores, here we have lots of settings regarding your store of course, especially its configuration. You'll spend quite a bit of time here early on getting things setup. If you click on Configuration, you have access to lots of different settings for your store. This is where you'll do things such as setup your store's physical address, your email address, places you'll ship to, things like that. This and Content, Configuration are where you establish a lot of the base settings for your store and your site. Think of your online operation as the combination of two separate things. Your actual store as an entity that has products that you are selling, and then your website, which is the visual presentation and customer interface for your store on the web. This area under Stores, Configuration is for your store itself. Whereas Content, Configuration controls the settings for your website. And then down here, we have System, which is a little bit more development related. A lot of this is more technical things that you may not spend a whole lot of time on if you're not an actual developer, if you're just trying to setup a site. We're not going to worry about Find Partners & Extensions right now. So again, this was just a basic overview of the backend of your Magento site. Now you'll have some idea of where you need to go to do certain things with your website. We're going to plunge into all of these in more depth however.