Interview: Jan Polzer about Drupal and freelancing

I’ve always been a bit torn between a lecturer, a programmer (nowadays it’s called a developer) and a writer. I used to build desktop applications, now I’m into web development and teaching web related stuff. I keep writing only for my blogs as a small pleasure.

This spring marks fifteen years since I have been freelance and work mainly from home in Brno. However, I also have a rented office not far from my house for meetings and training.

I like to go to nature and travel, I am interested in history. After the Czech Republic, Croatia, and lately I have taken a liking to boats and the Netherlands. I go to the canals and the Waddensee.

You mentioned on LinkedIn that you studied at Nottingham Trent University, what did you study there

And how was studying in England?

Well, I have a bachelor’s degree from Nottingham and a BA (Hons) degree, but I studied in the Czech Republic, remotely with subsequent nostrification. My specific database by industry major was Business Management. Being the freelancer that I am, I found it interesting. I originally wanted to study computer science, but I didn’t get into MUNI after high school, I left mechanical engineering early on and then there was no will to go to classical full-time studies.

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Anyway, I had colorful interpretations of Nottingham from clients from England.

You also manage two blogs where you mainly write about programming/software. One is maxiorel.cz in Czech and the other is polzer-sw.com in English, why are they divided like this? And how are they doing?
I currently have 38 of those websites running. There are a little more domains and their number fluctuates. But I mainly devote myself to the Ajťák blog, Maxiorel.cz is also a matter of my heart , to various projects about Croatia, and I only throw in a letter here and there on Výlety360. Maxiorel currently has around 700 visits per day. There was a time when it was an average of two thousand, maybe I’ll go back there someday.

I have a number of projects written in English, but I spread my word too widely, the websites stopped being pursued and they gradually failed in the search engines. But at least I have practical examples for my SEO basics training.

Polzer-SW.com was my first domain at a time when the Czech one was still terribly expensive. I wouldn’t have mentioned this site on my own. Unlike the well-maintained professional website polzer.cz, it is a bit outdated.

What are your plans for the future with them?
In the future, I want to continue to focus on Maxiorla and revive Polzer-SW.com a bit. A big impetus is the increasing number of clients from abroad. Of course, it wouldn’t be bad if each of the 30 or so websites had the traffic that Maxiorel has at the moment and I would have some income even when I no longer think of it as a programmer. But that’s more of a dream.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

You even wrote the first Czech books about Drupal, how did you get to it and what appealed to you about it compared to others?
The first, and if I don’t count someone’s electronic manuals and one translated book, perhaps the only one in Czech. When I registered the domain for Maxiorla, I was looking for an editorial system. Blogs were taking off. Mambo (today’s Joomla!) did not excite me, other CMS were strange or did not have a usable Czech localization. Drupal already had a good solution to this problem.

At that time, I was writing for Computer magazine and on Živa.cz. Word got around and I built a Drupal website for the magazine. And since I already had two other books and a lot of articles, I got an offer to write a book about Drupal. Then it kind of dragged on with me.

The memory of Drupal even away from the PC is reminded by a mug with the logo

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And even though I have two official certifications for Drupal (also the first in our country), I am not burdened only by it. I build websites on WordPress or custom web applications in the Symfony PHP framework. Sometimes a loyal fan writes to me that I betray the Drupal community, but I don’t take it that way. It is necessary to try other directions and not have blinders on your eyes.

What are the advantages of Drupal over WordPress?

specific database by industry

Basically the same thing that Drupalists praise about Drupal and criticize WordPress, I heard in the opposite direction at the meeting of the WordPress community. And both communities curse Joomla, the third most popular open ar numbers source content management system written in PHP.

I personally appreciate Drupal’s

Quality programming base , I like that it is based on Symfony  Як выбраць найлепшага крэдытора на будаўніцтва ў 2024 годзе and Twig. From an administration point of view, I appreciate the detailed management of user permissions in contrast to basic WordPress. I also think it has a slightly better handle on creating new content types and fields.

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