Glossary

A collection of terms and definitions through Pantheon's Documentation

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This page dynamically displays all defined terms in the Pantheon Documentation project.

A

A11y: a11y stands for "accessibility". Use of this term on the internet helps to identify content related specifically to digital accessibility.

Ableist language: Ableist language is offensive to people with disability. It can also refer to language that is derogatory, abusive, or negative about disability.

Advanced Global CDN: Advanced Global CDN is a Managed Service that takes Pantheon's CDN offering a step forward, for customers that require unique optimizations for digital delivery at scale.

Age: The number of seconds cache has been available to serve the request. Any number greater than zero indicates that this response was served to the browser from cache.

American with Disabilities Act: The American with Disabilities Act (ADA), defines a person with a disability as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits at least one major life activity. Disabilities can be both permanent or temporary/situational.

Authoritative Name Server: The service that publishes your domain's DNS records

Web accessibility: Web accessibility refers to building websites, tools, and technologies that are designed and developed to allow people with disabilities to use them.

B

Bias: Allows certain parts of indexed items to influence the importance of search results. The higher the bias, the greater the influence; the range is 0.1 to 21.0.

Block Caching: If you're generating a block, this will expose the block to Drupal's built-in block caching.

C

Cache-control: This header should include a max-age that is the maximum number of seconds that the cache can be kept.

Classist language: Classist language denigrates or erases the experience of those from other socio-economic classes, specifically those classes seen as "below" the speaker.

Containers: Containers package code and their dependencies together. We provision isolated Linux containers with an optimized PHP stack in place.

Content Management (CMS): Content Management (CMS) is a software application that allows users to collaborate in the creation, editing, and production of digital content, such as web pages, blog posts, etc. Pantheon supports both Drupal and WordPress, as well as allowing you to run a decoupled CMS.

Continuous Integration: Continuous Integration (CI) is a method of running automated unit and integration tests to apply quality control. Pantheon doesn't provide or host tools for continuous integration, but many tools and techniques are compatible with Pantheon. If you have a particular use case or technique that you'd like to highlight, let us know by contacting support.

Core: A core is a separate configuration and index using a single Solr instance. A core is created when the schema is posted. For more information, see https://wiki.apache.org/solr/CoreAdmin

D

Database: A single .sql dump that contains the content and active state of the site's configurations.

Document: A document is similar to a database row, containing the contents of what is to be searched and whatever fields are associated with it, like title.

Domain: The last section of your website name before the TLD, the domain is what you purchase from the Registrar.

F

Facet: Search facets allow search results to be filtered; examples include seeing a list of potential filters and the count of matches for each filter on the left, like Amazon product searches.

G

Gendered language: Gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender.

Git: Git is an open source version control system. It’s fast, secure, and reliable, and supports both simple versioning or complex, distributed, non-linear workflows for hundreds of contributors.

I

Identity Provider (SAML): Where user information is housed (e.g. Google Apps).

Inclusive Design: Inclusive Design is a methodology that considers the full range of human diversity, with respect to ability, language, culture, and more. Its intent is to create products whose experiences serve as many people as possible, including those with disabilities.

Inclusive language: Inclusive language is defined as "language that avoids the use of certain expressions or words that might be considered to exclude particular groups of people."

Index: Structure containing extracted keywords from a document for rapid search and retrieval, similar to a database table.

M

Multidevs: Multidevs are development environments for teams. A Multidev environment allows a developer to fork the entire stack (code and content), work independently, and then merge the code changes back into the main master site. Each forked branch has its own separate development environment, including database and files. Each branch environment can be independently set to use either SFTP or Git mode for code changes.

Multizone Failover: Multizone Failover is a high-availability Disaster Recovery solution with intelligent failover at the Global CDN layer.

Q

Query Results Caching: Raw Query Results, which should be cached for at least 1 minute. As the subject matter expert, you're in the best position to know how often your content should change.

R

Racial language: Racial language is derogatory to people due to their ethnicity, race, or skin color. These terms, slurs, and stereotypes contributed to decades of prejudice, discrimination, and violence.

Registrar: The service through which you purchase a domain name. Most registrars also offer DNS management services.

Rendered Output Caching: Generated markup, which should be cached for as long as possible (if the query changes, the output will be refreshed).

S

Owning entity: Secrets are either owned by a site or an organization. Within that owning entity, the secret may have zero or more environment overrides.

Schema.xml: Contains details about the fields that documents can contain, and how those fields are handled when adding documents to the index or querying those fields. Must be posted using the pantheon_apachesolr module before indexing and searching will work. For more information, see https://wiki.apache.org/solr/SchemaXml.

Score: Calculated relevance of matches influenced by bias, represented as a float.

Secret: A secret is a key-value pair that should not be exposed to the general public, typically something like a password, API key, or other sensitive information that should not be added to version control.

Secret's scope: A secret's scope is the answer to the question "Where is the secret's value available?". Once set, a secret's scope cannot be changed. The secret must be deleted and recreated to change its scope.

Service Provider (SAML): Application depending on user information provided by the Identity Provider (e.g. WordPress).

Subdomain: Separate by periods (.), subdomains precede the domain name. www is the most commonly seen subdomain. Subdomains can also stack (example: www.something.example.com).

Surrogate-key-raw: Metadata including the the content IDs for what was displayed on this page. This metadata instructs this page to be cleared from cache when any of those posts are saved again. This header is only present when you specifically add a debugging header (Pantheon-Debug:1) to your request. You can use a browser extension to add the debugging header. Here are some extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

T

TLD: Stands for Top Level Domain. This is the last piece of your website URL (.com, .net, .org, etc)

U

Unconscious biases: Unconscious biases are underlying stereotypes, attitudes, or generalizations we hold toward a group of people that may not be immediately obvious, but affect how we treat others.

V

Violent communication: Violent communication limits liberty, denies recognition of needs, diminishes the worth of a person, and/or blocks compassion. Violent communication is often the result of using manipulative or coercive language that induces fear, guilt, shame, praise, blame, duty, obligation, punishment, and/or reward.

W

WAI-ARIA 1.1: [WAI-ARIA 1.1](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/) provides guidance for dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. It provides insights on ARIA roles, states, and properties to make custom widgets accessible, usable, and interoperable with assistive technologies and to those who rely on keyboard navigation.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an internationally accepted standard for website accessibility. WCAG documents provide detailed explanations and examples on how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. The current standard and drafts can be found in the WCAG 2 Overview.

X

X-served-by: This header indicates which POP your response came from. Our primary infrastructure is in the Midwest of the United States so the first item you will probably see on this list will include "ORD" for the O'Hare airport in Chicago. If you're physically located in Austin you will also see DFW, indicating the response went from the primary datacenter to a cached copy in Chicago to a cached copy in Dallas.