Pantheon release notes: Plugins

The latest 1.4.2 update of the Pantheon MU Plugin is now available. This update fixes a bug in the pantheon_cache_default_max_age filter added in 1.4.0 where the filtered value was not being used in the cache control headers. This bug was found by Brian Perondi and surfaced in our Community Slack Workspace. We appreciate the report and the fix will be available with the next WordPress release. Composer-based WordPress installs can get the update right away by running composer update.

We have updated the WordPress core upstreams (WordPress and WordPress (Composer Managed)) to provide a new PANTHEON_HOSTNAME constant. This value can be helpful when defining DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE on WordPress multisite installations. By default, the PANTHEON_HOSTNAME constant is set to the value of the HTTP_HOST server variable, which is the hostname of the request. However, when this value is unavailable, the PANTHEON_HOSTNAME provides fallback values, thereby avoiding "Undefined index: HTTP_HOST" warnings. For more information, refer to our WordPress Multisite configuration guide.

The latest 1.4.1 release of the Pantheon MU Plugin updates the recommended configuration for WordPress multisite to use the new PANTHEON_HOSTNAME constant when defining DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE rather than the previous recommendation -- either $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] or a complicated PHP switch.

With the latest 1.4.0 release of the Pantheon MU Plugin, we have updated the default cache max-age used to one week. Previously, the default value was 10 minutes. This change is intended to improve the performance by increasingly the likelihood that an unexpired cached copy of a page is present within the CDN. Often such increases in max-age settings carry the risk that site visitors see stale content that should be replaced by newly published posts. Pantheon greatly mitigates this risk with The Pantheon Advanced Page Cache plugin. This plugin granularly clears cached responses using post IDs and other metadata. We highly recommend using the Pantheon Advanced Page Cache plugin to ensure that your site is performing optimally.

This change does not change the max age for existing sites that have already saved their max age (formerly displayed as TTL) value.

You can modify this new default value using a filter built into the MU Plugin. For more information refer to our WordPress Cache Plugin Configuration.

Included in this release are some changes to the Site Health page in the WordPress admin dashboard. We have removed recommended Site Health tests that were previously recommending things that were not possible on Pantheon's read-only filesystem and we have added new tests that check your Redis object cache configuration. If Redis is not enabled for a site, you will see a recommendation in the Site Health page, and you will see new recommendations if Redis is active but you are not using an object caching plugin like Object Cache Pro.

Finally, 1.4.0 adds a filter that allows you to skip cache control headers for specific requests. This is useful if you have a specific page that you do not want to cache. For more information refer to our GitHub repository documentation. Special thanks to Eric Caron for contributing the suggestion that became the pantheon_skip_cache_control filter.

The latest version of Solr Search for WordPress, version 2.5.3, became available as of April 24, 2024.

Highlights

• Bug fixes: Fixed an issue identified by a user (offshorealert on WordPress.org) that prevented tax_query arguments from being parsed correctly by Solr.

You can upgrade to Solr Search for WordPress 2.5.3 from your WordPress dashboard on your Pantheon development environment to get this update.

On March 25, 2024, it was announced in the WordPress development blog that the default storage location for the Font Library (added in WordPress 6.5) will be wp-content/uploads/fonts. Previously, we had added a feature to our Pantheon MU Plugin to support the new Font Library feature by changing the previous default path (wp-content/fonts) to wp-content/uploads/fonts. This change to our MU plugin removes that override as it is no longer necessary. You can read more about the Font Library feature in our guide to using the Font Library on Pantheon.

Pantheon Advanced Page Cache v1.5.0 is now available on WordPress.org and GitHub. This release adds a new filter to make cache purges less aggressive and provide more flexibility for developers and the sites they maintain. You can learn about the filter in the plugin's README file which includes an example of how to use it.

Additionally, this update implements our recently updated WPUnit Helpers project to simplify PHP Unit tests as well as our recently developed Plugin Release Actions to automate steps in the release process.

You can read the full changelog in the GitHub release notes.

WordPress 6.5 will add a new Font Library feature. The Font Library allows you to upload fonts from your computer or add any of the fonts available on Google's font library to your WordPress site. In anticipation of this, Pantheon has added a feature to our Pantheon MU Plugin to support the new Font Library feature. You can read more about the Font Library feature in our guide to using the Font Library on Pantheon.