Investing in the Core That Powers Us All
According to the Drupal Core dashboard, code quality has never been better. Real progress is happening, powered by Drupal contributors.
“The charts tell a clear story of steady, hard-won progress. A story to be proud of and worth sharing. Code quality is dramatically better than it was in Drupal 7: lower complexity, easier to maintain, fewer anti-patterns, and dramatically better test coverage.”
Catch has been contributing to Drupal since 2006, and he's been on Third and Grove's payroll since our early days. His focus on performance, scalability, and core maintenance has made him invaluable to the platform's evolution.
These under-the-hood engineering changes ensure that the platform remains a robust, modern, and professional-grade tool for the people who ultimately use it to manage content.
Sponsoring Drupal's Biggest Performance Breakthrough
Drupal 11.3 marks the biggest performance win in 10 years. Drupal.org’s Git repositories show Third and Grove led the charge: We sponsored more than half of the commits behind this release. Catch also worked directly on many of the performance improvements that went into the release.
Get the technical details in the Drupal release announcement and catch’s DrupalCon Vienna presentation.
Enterprise Drupal sites now scale better, load faster, and cost less to run:
- Faster Page Loads at Scale – Large sites with heavy traffic or lots of dynamic content will see significantly faster page delivery. Cold caches now trigger ~30-50% fewer database and cache operations, which is often where enterprise sites hit performance bottlenecks.
- Lower Server Load – Reducing database and cache calls means less stress on the backend. This is crucial for enterprises, where scaling databases is much harder and more expensive than adding web servers.
- Better User Experience for Authenticated Visitors – BigPipe and HTMX improvements reduce JavaScript and make even partially cached pages load faster, improving speed for users who are logged in.
- Efficiency Gains on Complex Pages – Features like Paragraphs and entity references are now more optimized, so even complex content-heavy pages can perform well without custom caching hacks.
- Future-Proofing – These improvements set a new baseline for performance, making it easier to maintain speed as sites grow, add features, or handle spikes in traffic.
Nice Core Committer You've Got There…
The Drupal community relies heavily on a small number of dedicated core contributors, and many of them are volunteering their time or working for organizations that don't directly benefit from their contributions.
