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 Kristaps Kruzmanis, one of our great translators!

Hi Kristaps! First, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I have spent twenty years in information technology, started with Alcatel PBX and physical networking before moving to IT as a network administrator. Now, I am working on projects with Joomla! and PrestaShop, but also on web hosting and network administration. And I have built a kayak to learn Greenland rolling!

When and why did you get involved in contributing to the PrestaShop project? What motivates you?

My idea is to contribute (to all and from all) so that we can evolve together while never stop learning. I have started to translate PrestaShop because I needed it for friends’ e-commerce shops. It was my decision to use PrestaShop over other platforms, but Latvian language was not translated at this time.

Do you have any advice for first-time PrestaShop contributors?

Yes: think globally, the internet is not local. And the same goes inside e-commerce shops: think globally, make everything short and simple, especially categories. Choose right between categories, tags, etc. which will be which. Install sample data to play with it, this way you can understand how it is built and how it works. Think about delivery or payments before building the shop.

Always tell the clients that they need to have at least one person working on their shop. Never do the clients homework, push them for this person instead. It takes one day to make an e-commerce shop, one week to make the design (with the template and the CSS changes) and ages for a client to insert products. Be aware of this.

What’s the number one thing you’ve learnt by contributing to Open Source projects?

I already knew everything we all know. We just need to remember or Google it.

Thank you Kristaps, we hope to see you more from you as PrestaShop evolves! :)