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Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

drupal experts - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Drupal’s worldwide success stems from a passionate community of experts.

These individuals equally embody leadership in open-source contributions, startup innovation while still coding, influential blogging and speaking, impactful work at major tech companies, and even award-winning community service. Below is a curated list of the best and most active Drupal experts globally, each excelling in at least one of those areas:

  1. Gábor Hojtsy
  2. Nathaniel Catchpole
  3. Alex Pott
  4. Jacob Rockowitz
  5. David Strauss
  6. Wim Leers
  7. Randy Fay
  8. Tim Plunkett
  9. Preston So
  10. Lauri Eskola
  11. Lee Rowlands
  12. Bojan Živanović
  13. Wolfgang Ziegler
  14. Amitai Burstein
  15. Matt Glaman
  16. Baddý Sonja Breidert
  17. Cathy Theys

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable contributions and why they stand out in the Drupal ecosystem:

Gabor Hojtsy

YouTube Video

Nationality: Hungarian

Gábor is the Drupal 11 Product Manager and a force behind Drupal’s multilingual success.

Active since 2003, he served as the Drupal 6 release manager and later coordinated the massive Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, rallying over 1,300 contributors to make Drupal 8 multilingual out-of-the-box. Gábor also co-led DrupalCon Szeged 2008 and Drupal Europe 2018, reflecting his community leadership.

As Acquia’s first employee, he continues to drive core innovation (recently the Drupal 10 readiness and “Drupal 11” plans) and frequently shares updates through blog posts and talks.

Nathaniel Catchpole

Nationality: British

Nat Catchpole is renowned for his work on Drupal performance and scalability.

Using Drupal since 2005, he contributed over 400 patches to Drupal 7 and became a core maintainer for Drupal 8. Nat led critical efforts to improve Drupal’s caching, entity system, and database layers, and co-authored High Performance Drupal, sharing best practices. As a Senior Architect at Tag1 Consulting, he continues to optimize Drupal for enterprise use and serves as a core framework manager and release manager.

His expertise has made him one of the top contributors to multiple Drupal releases.

Alex Pott

Nationality: British

Alex is a Drupal 8 core co-maintainer who was instrumental in developing Drupal’s Configuration Management system.

He began contributing in 2007 and quickly became known for tackling complex core subsystems. Alex’s leadership in the Configuration Management Initiative gave Drupal robust configuration export/import capabilities for the first time. Invited by Dries to join the core team, he became one of the most prolific Drupal 8 committers, reviewing and signing off on highly technical patches.

Alex has worked full-time on Drupal (with sponsorship from Chapter Three and others) and continues to guide core improvements through the Drupal Core Team.

Jacob Rockowitz

Jacob Rockowitz - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Nationality: American

Jacob is the creator and maintainer of the Webform module, Drupal’s most popular form-building solution.

A Drupal developer for over a decade, he single-handedly ported Webform to Drupal 8 and has continually improved it since 2015. Webform is now one of the top-installed contributed modules, empowering site builders to create complex forms and surveys. Jacob is also an active blogger – his posts on Drupal UX, module development, and Schema.org integration (via his newer Schema.org Blueprints module) are widely read in the community.

He mentors contributors and advocates for sustainability in open source, embodying the spirit of innovation in the Drupal contrib space.

David Strauss

Nationality: American

David is a web infrastructure expert who helped Drupal scale to the enterprise.

He co-founded the Drupal agency Four Kitchens and created Pressflow, a custom Drupal 6 distribution that incorporated performance enhancements like Varnish caching and database replication. Pressflow’s innovations were later merged into Drupal core, thanks to David’s work. In 2010, he co-founded Pantheon, a cloud platform for Drupal and WordPress, where he serves as CTO. At Pantheon, David has built a platform that operationalizes best practices (like Git workflows and containers) for Drupal hosting at scale.

He remains an active open-source advocate, sharing knowledge on caching, DevOps, and performance within the Drupal community.

Wim Leers

Wim Leers - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Nationality: Belgian

Wim is a Senior Principal Software Engineer on Acquia’s Drupal Acceleration Team and a driving force behind Drupal’s performance and editorial UX improvements.

Involved since 2007, he contributed popular modules like Hierarchical Select and CDN early in his career. Wim later co-developed the BigPipe system (with Fabian Franz) to boost perceived performance, and he led the integration of the CKEditor rich text editor into Drupal core. He has served as a maintainer for multiple core subsystems and initiatives, and is credited with hundreds of core patches and dozens of security fixes.

Wim’s work has made Drupal faster and easier to use, from front-end theming to advanced caching.

Randy Fay

Nationality: American

Randy is a veteran Drupal contributor who has been active for over 17 years. He was a core developer during the Drupal 7 cycle and maintained critical modules in Drupal’s ecosystem.

Randy is perhaps best known now as the lead maintainer of DDEV, the open-source Docker-based development environment that has become a staple for Drupal developers. His career spans from early web development (and even firmware coding) to being an authority on modern Drupal workflows. A generous mentor, Randy has spent countless hours helping others in issue queues and IRC/Slack.

In recognition of his profound impact, he received the 2023 Aaron Winborn Award for his kindness, integrity, and service to the Drupal community.

Tim Plunkett

Nationality: American

Tim has been a Drupal developer for over 15 years and is behind some of Drupal’s most significant features.

He helped migrate the Views module into Drupal core (a massive effort that fundamentally enhanced Drupal 8) and architected the Layout Builder system, giving site builders a powerful drag-and-drop page design tool in core. Over the years, he has maintained key subsystems such as the form API and menu system, and contributed to countless core improvements. Tim now works at Acquia, where he leads the Drupal Acceleration Team’s engineers to drive new innovations.

He remains an active contributor and mentor, regularly answering questions and writing patches to refine Drupal’s developer experience.

Preston So

Preston So - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Nationality: American

Preston is a prominent author, digital strategist, and advocate of decoupled Drupal.

Active in the Drupal community since 2007, Preston served as Director of Research and Innovation at Acquia and helped launch the first editions of Decoupled Drupal architectures. He wrote the influential book Decoupled Drupal in Practice (2018) and has given keynotes worldwide on the future of content management. Preston’s contributions span code (he was part of the Spark initiative for modern editing UX) as well as community, having co-founded the Decoupled Drupal Days conference.

He emphasizes the importance of inclusivity and “building with empathy” in open source, a perspective shaped by his 15+ years in the Drupal project.

Lauri Eskola

Nationality: Finnish

Lauri is a front-end powerhouse in the Drupal core team. He is a core committer who co-maintains Drupal’s theme system and leads the Frontend Framework initiative.

Hailing from Finland, Lauri joined Acquia’s Drupal Acceleration Team and quickly became the go-to expert on modernizing Drupal’s UI (he was key in the new Claro and Olivero themes and the upcoming “Project Browser” and “CMS Bootstrap” initiatives). He has been using Drupal since around 2011 and is now a Product Manager for Drupal core, helping ensure Drupal’s features align with end-user needs.

Lauri often shares insights on Drupal’s future (for example, as a Drupal Dev Days 2024 keynote on the new “Project Starshot” vision) and exemplifies the blend of technical skill and product thinking.

Lee Rowlands

Nationality: Australian

Lee is a top Drupal core contributor from Australia.

Active for 13+ years, he has worn many hats: core committer, subsystem maintainer, security team member, and documentation editor. Lee became the Framework Manager for Drupal core starting with Drupal 8.5, overseeing fundamental core APIs. He maintains several core modules (like Custom Block, Comment, and Contact) and co-authored the Tour module (an in-app guidance system). Lee also initiated the community #PatchADay challenge to inspire regular contributions. By day, he is a senior developer (and part owner) at PreviousNext, a Drupal agency, where he leads projects and mentors colleagues.

His dedication earned him recognition as one of the most dependable and productive contributors in Drupal.

Bojan Zivanovic

Bojan Zivanovic - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Nationality: Serbian

Bojan is a highly respected Drupal developer known for both his prolific contributions and his expertise in e-commerce.

He started with Drupal in 2007 and quickly made a mark by creating popular contrib modules like Views Bulk Operations (VBO) and Inline Entity Form. Bojan was a top 5 Drupal core contributor from 2017–2019, helping drive the adoption of Composer for Drupal and many improvements in entity and field systems. He also served as Drupal Commerce 2.x lead at Commerce Guys, architecting the modern commerce framework for Drupal 8. Now a Director of Engineering at Platform.sh, he continues to support Drupal by improving developer tools and workflow integration.

Bojan’s breadth of contributions, from admin UX to Composer and commerce, make him one of Drupal’s most versatile experts.

Wolfgang Ziegler

Nationality: Austrian

Wolfgang is the creator of the Rules module, which has been a game-changer for building automated workflows in Drupal sites.

A Drupal evangelist since 2005, he became known for his motto “Let site builders create custom behavior without coding,” which Rules accomplished. Wolfgang is a long-time Drupal core contributor and contributed module maintainer (he also helped maintain OAuth, Entity API, and more). He is Managing Partner and CTO at drunomics in Austria, where he leads a team working on decoupled Drupal solutions. Wolfgang remains active in core discussions (especially around workflow, content moderation, and decoupling) and frequently presents on advanced topics like bridging Drupal with frontend frameworks.

His analytical approach and 18+ years of experience make him a trusted authority in the community.

Amitai Burstein

Amitai Burstein - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Nationality: Israeli

Amitai is co-owner and CTO of Gizra, a Drupal web agency based in Tel Aviv, and one of the top architects in Drupal’s contrib space.

He’s been using Drupal since version 4.6 and is widely known for maintaining Organic Groups (OG) – a cornerstone module for social features in Drupal. Amitai also created the RESTful module (precursor to Drupal 8’s REST API), the Message stack for notifications, and Entity Reference (which became part of core). Balancing running a company and open-source coding, he has proven that you can still “get your hands dirty” as a startup founder. Amitai shares lessons on his blog and at conferences about module architecture, Elm and JavaScript integration with Drupal, and fostering a healthy work-life balance as a developer.

His contributions have enriched Drupal’s module ecosystem tremendously.

Matt Glaman

Nationality: American

We need to stop treating Drupal sites like snowflakes and start treating them like software projects.

Matt is an open-source innovator who focuses on improving the developer experience in Drupal. He co-maintains Drupal Commerce and has authored the Drupal 8 Development Cookbook, but his recent fame comes from building tools like Drupal Check and PHPStan for Drupal.

These tools help developers catch deprecations and errors in their code, smoothing the path for Drupal upgrades. Matt has been active in Drupal for over a decade and is a prolific blogger and YouTuber, sharing insights on topics from headless Drupal to test-driven development. Currently a Principal Software Engineer at Acquia, he contributes many core patches (particularly around Composer and CI automation) and is an advocate for modernizing Drupal’s development workflows.

Matt’s combination of module development (Commerce, JSON:API extras) and tooling makes him a key influencer for Drupal’s future.

Baddy Sonja Breidert

Baddy Sonja Breidert - Meet the 17 Best Drupal Experts of the Year

Nationality: German/Icelandic

Baddý is a prominent figure in the Drupal community in Europe, known for both her business leadership and community service.

She co-founded 1xINTERNET, a fast-growing Drupal agency in Germany and Spain, and has been an active Drupal contributor since 2013. Baddý has organized numerous DrupalCons and camps (including DrupalCon Europe events) and in 2019 was elected Chair of the Drupal Association Board, becoming a global voice for the community. In 2020 she won the Aaron Winborn Award – a recognition by peers for her outstanding contributions and kindness.

While not a coder by trade, she champions Drupal by fostering collaboration, marketing Drupal to new audiences, and investing in strategic initiatives (like the Drupal Admin UI modernizations). Baddý’s passion and advocacy have significantly strengthened the Drupal ecosystem.

Cathy Theys

Nationality: American

Cathy is a Drupal contributor celebrated for her mentorship and community organizing.

She has contributed to Drupal core since around 2009, focusing on improving the contribution process – she is often seen running contribution sprints and gently “herding cats” in the issue queues. Cathy was the inaugural winner of the Aaron Winborn Award in 2015, a testament to her exceptional personal integrity and commitment to the community. She helped develop Drupal 8 (working on the migration system and release coordination) and has worked at various Drupal companies as a developer and community liaison.

Through countless patch reviews, screencasts, and sprint sessions, Cathy has onboarded new contributors globally, making Drupal better for everyone.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. If you intend to share or make use of it in any way, we kindly ask that you include a backlink to the original source – EchoGlobal.

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