Pantheon release notes

PHP version 8.4.18 is now available on the platform. This update includes bug fixes and enhancements that improve performance and stability. Updates will be applied automatically over the next few days, so no manual action is required.

PHP 8.4 is only available with the new PHP Runtime Generation 2.

We’ve updated the Top Traffic Patterns interface, located in the Metrics tab of your Live environment dashboard, to give you deeper visibility into your site's traffic. You can now see the exact request count alongside each of the metrics IPs, User Agents, and Paths.

By surfacing the exact volume of requests, it is much easier to measure the true impact of specific actors or pages. These counts help you confidently decide if an aggressive scraper warrants being blocked, or exactly how much load a highly visited path is handling so you can accurately prioritize your caching and optimization efforts.

Note: The Top Traffic Patterns feature is in active, iterative development. You can expect frequent updates and new enhancements in the near future.

We have released version 0.8.0 and version 0.9.0 of the 'Push to Pantheon' GitHub Action.

What's new in 0.8.0?

Version 0.8.0 adds several new features and improvements to the GitHub Action.

• Git-only deployment - You can now deploy directly to Pantheon using Git push without requiring Terminus Build Tools. Set skip_build_tools: true to use this lightweight deployment option, which is ideal for brand-new sites or workflows that don't need database or file syncing.
• Automatic Build Tools fallback - The action now automatically falls back to Git-only mode when Build Tools operations fail, ensuring deployments succeed even when the Build Tools plugin encounters issues. This fixes a failure mode where deploys would fail if a site did not yet have a Live environment initialized.
• Multidev limit checking - The action now checks if you've reached Pantheon's multidev limit before attempting to create environments, providing clear error messages when limits are reached instead of cryptic failures.
• GitHub permission validation - New pre-flight permission checks validate that your GITHUB_TOKEN has the required scopes before starting deployments, with helpful error messages explaining how to fix missing permissions.
• Build Tools version selection - You can now choose which version of the Terminus Build Tools plugin to install using the build_tools_version input parameter. This gives you control over plugin compatibility and allows testing development versions if a particular Build Tools version or branch is required.

What's new in 0.9.0?

Version 0.9.0 adds a number of under-the-hood improvements and moves much of the scripting logic out of the action.yml file and into a new main.sh file. This makes the action easier to maintain and test, and also allows for more complex logic that would be difficult to implement directly in the action.yml file.

Additionally, version 0.9.0 adds comprehensive unit and integration tests for the actions logic and deployment workflows, improving the reliability and stability of the action. The new testing framework also allows for easier debugging and faster development of new features in the future.

For more details and a full list of changes in these releases, please refer to the 0.8.0 release notes and 0.9.0 release notes.

To update to the latest version, modify your workflow file to use 0.9.0:

Tesseract OCR is now available with PHP Runtime Generation 2. This open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine can be used in combination with Apache Tika to enable your sites to extract text from images and scanned documents.

As a follow-up to our release note announcing the removal of PHP Runtime Generation 1, we're now providing specific dates for the removal from the platform.

What's changing when?

All environments that have not been upgraded to PHP Runtime Generation 2 will be auto-upgraded on the following schedule:

• April 6, 2026: Dev and Multidev environments will be auto-upgraded to Generation 2
• April 13, 2026: Test and Live environments will be auto-upgraded to Generation 2

After these dates, PHP Runtime Generation 1 will no longer be available.

Action Required

We strongly recommend that all site owners proactively test and upgrade to Generation 2 rather than waiting for the auto-upgrade. This allows you to:

• Test your site in Dev and Multidev environments before the upgrade reaches Test and Live
• Address any compatibility issues on your own timeline
• Avoid potential downtime or unexpected issues during the auto-upgrade

Please review the Known Changes and Requirements if you are still in the process of upgrading your site.

The Content Publisher MCP Server is now in Public Beta. This integration enables AI assistants and other agentic applications to interact directly with Content Publisher, streamlining content workflows through natural language commands.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that allows AI assistants and agentic applications to securely connect with external tools and data sources. With the Content Publisher MCP Server, content teams can manage their publishing workflows conversationally -- without leaving their AI assistant interface.

What’s new?

• Connect and manage documents - Connect Google Docs to collections, disconnect documents, and transfer ownership.
• Publish content - Preview, publish, unpublish, and manage approval workflows. Manage all documents metadata.
• Manage collections - Create collections, manage collaborators, administrators and access control, administer webhooks as well as all collection configurations options.
• Work with content model - Manage metadata schemas.

Example workflows

• "Create a Google Doc about our product launch and connect it to the Marketing collection, go through the preview, enrich and publish phase"
• "Update the description metadata for the Q1 report and publish it"
• "Add sarah@company.com as a collaborator on the Documentation collection"
• “Find all documents with Author set at “John Doe” and replace with “Jane Doe”

And really, any other content operation workflow you might think of!

Getting Started

The Content Publisher MCP Server is now in public beta, available to all Content Publisher users. If you are not yet a user, you can sign-up for a free plan on pantheon.io. For instructions on how to install and use, see the Content Publisher MCP documentation.

We welcome your feedback as we continue to improve this integration. Please report any issues through our regular support channels or make feature requests through our Pantheon Roadmap site.

The latest version of WordPress, 6.9.1, is available on Pantheon as of February 4, 2026.

Action required

Upgrade to WordPress 6.9.1 right from your Pantheon dashboard or Terminus to access the latest features, fixes, and security enhancements. See related documentation for how to apply core updates.

Highlights

• This minor release includes fixes for 49 bugs throughout Core and the Block Editor, addressing issues affecting multiple areas of WordPress including the block editor, mail, and classic themes. For a full list of bug fixes, please refer to the release candidate announcement.

WordPress 6.9.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major version of WordPress will be 7.0; it is scheduled for release on 9 April 2026 at WordCamp Asia.

For full details about WordPress 6.9.1, see the official release announcement.

A new user interface is now available in the Metrics tab of the Live environment of site dashboards, named Top traffic patterns which reports the following new traffic metrics:

• Top IP addresses
• Top user agents
• Top visited URL paths

With this data, you can identify aggressive crawlers or scrapers, that you may want to block manually or prioritize caching and optimization efforts based on the specific pages receiving the highest request volume.

Note: This data includes both counted and uncounted visits.