An Open Source community is more than just PR made by faceless strangers. In order to better understand the people who contribute time and skills to the PrestaShop project, we’re launching a series of interviews with contributors of all ranges. This week, meet Marcin Szperlik!

Could you tell us a bit about yourself, and how you got involved in Prestashop?

Hello! I’m a full-stack developer and designer from Poland. For the past few years, I have been working with PrestaShop as my full-time daily job. Prior to that, I worked with a few e-commerce systems, but since 2010 PrestaShop is my favorite. In 2012, I created the Warehouse theme, which became very popular.

You are the creator of Warehouse, a popular PrestaShop theme, and you are creating a theme for v1.7.
What is your feeling on the theming changes brought by 1.7?

The new frontend architecture in PrestaShop 1.7 is great. It allows to create more advanced design faster and with better code. It uses the latest technologies and it is very fun to work with. I really love it!

I also like the fact that the JavaScript Core of the front office is excluded from the template file: thanks to that, there will be less compatibility problems, and updating will be easier.

What do you think of the Starter Theme?

I developed the Warehouse theme using the Classic theme. However, in some places, I replaced the Classic files with files from the Starter Theme because it was easier for me to develop the entire page from scratch. I think the Starter theme is great for creating custom projects.

What advice would you give to new theme creators?

I think high customizability is a huge factor in e-commerce themes. Sometimes I see a nice looking theme which does not achieve success simply because they did not allow the merchant to adapt it easily and to make it different from the main demo.

You have started contributing more to PrestaShop, through pull requests and Forge tickets.
What motivates you to do so?

During development of the Warehouse theme, I was able to spot some issues, and since it is important to me also to make a stable template, I decided to fix/report them.

Working with the Core also helps to improve the system, so I also benefit from that. Developing a new theme framework for PS 1.7 was a pretty busy period for me, but soon I have plans to contribute more.

How do you think we could help people contribute more?

Maybe you should promote http://forge.prestashop.com so non-developers/users start creating tickets instead of posting on forum. It would be great to create integration with the Prestashop back office, so that it is possible to create a ticket directly from one’s shop.

Thank you Marcin, we hope to see you soon in our Core Weekly reports! :)