Pantheon release notes

A refreshed, modernized site creation experience is now available in the Pantheon Dashboard for all users.

Share questions and feedback in the Pantheon Community Slack.

Key Changes

• The process and workflow is the same, with fewer “loading” screens.
• Design improvements to align with the latest usability standards.
• Previously, errors were checked after form submission. Now, errors are checked as you type.
• Previously, after deployment completed, only a single button was shown for opening the new site dashboard. In the new experience, we've added next steps in context with relevant documentation links:

PHP versions 8.3.27 and 8.4.14, are now available on the platform. These updates bring the latest bug fixes, improving performance and security for your sites. The latest versions have already rolled out to all sites.

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

The PHP 8.4 upgrade process automatically includes an upgrade to PHP Runtime Generation 2 if your site hasn't been upgraded already.

Important PHP version information

• PHP 8.1 and 8.2 are currently receiving security-only updates.
• For more details, see the full list of PHP supported versions.

For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 and above.

For sites using Object Cache Pro, a new recommended config constant, Pantheon OCP Config Version 2.0, is now available.

The primary change is setting the analytics persist setting to false to reduce Redis errors experienced by sites. This will now clear object caching analytics when the cache is flushed.

View the new config constant here.

Action Required

You may choose to manually replace the WP_REDIS_CONFIG constant in your wp-config-ocp.php or re-run terminus install:run <site>.<environment> ocp to apply the changes.

The following updates are now available for Content Publisher:

• New release of the Pantheon Content Publisher v1.0.3 Drupal module now available.
• With Approval Workflows enabled, Administrators now have the option to Approve submissions directly from the Pending approval tab of a Collection in the Content Dashboard. Previously, opening each submission in Preview mode was required.
• The experience for Smart Components has been improved for first time users.
• Upgrade Content Publisher AI metadata suggestion to use Gemini 2.5 flash instead of Gemini 2.0.
• Bug fix for our Next.js starter kit and SDK to properly support Next.js 15.5 and the use of App Router. Improve the build process by using pinned versions of dependencies.
• Fix several event tracking issues in the back-end.

PHP Runtime Generation is now reported for each environment by the Site Dashboard under the Status tab in the Software Versions block.

This new data point provides immediate, at-a-glance confirmation of your site's underlying PHP configuration, making it simpler to track your stack and prepare for platform updates.

Alternatively, you may use the terminus env:info <site>.<env> command using Terminus 4.0.2+ to see the current PHP Runtime Generation.

To understand what PHP Runtime Generation means for your site and learn more about the rollout timeline, see related documentation.

Effective October 22, 2025, the "Unprivileged" user role will be transitioned to a new "Contributor" role. Permissions will remain exactly the same, except that Contributors will have limited access to Workspaces in the Pantheon Dashboard. This update is to ensure that all Pantheon users have access to the modern dashboard experience.

No action is needed by Site Owners or Workspace Administrators.

Key changes

• The name will change from Unprivileged to Contributor
• Contributors will have limited access to Workspaces:

Users assigned this role will retain access solely to the sites for which they have been explicitly granted permission. They will not be authorized to modify Workspace configurations, access billing information, create custom upstreams, or perform other administrative functions. If these users are in multiple Workspaces, they will continue to have access to the Workspace Selector to change which Workspace they are currently working in.

Here's what you can expect a Contributor to see when accessing the Workspace:

The following user interface enhancements are now available for Content Publisher:

• Disconnecting a Google Workspace account is now self-serve, previously required contacting support
• Refreshing collection status can now be done manually in the Content Dashboard
• Publishing to Pantheon’s playground now supports personal Gmail accounts

We have also released several minor bug fixes, user interface enhancements, and formatting issues - which don’t affect functionality, but do improve the end user experience.

Editorial note: The date has been moved from January 19 to January 26.

Tika 1.18 and 1.21 will no longer be available starting January 26, 2026. Impacted sites must upgrade to Tika 3.2 which is available via PHP Runtime Generation 2.

The Apache Tika toolkit detects and extracts metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries. On the Pantheon platform, our customers tend to use Tika to parse PDF content for searching with Solr.

Action Required

For most customers, we expect the upgrade to be seamless and not require any manual intervention. But if your site has a custom Tika integration, we recommend you follow our documentation for upgrading to Tika 3 as soon as possible to ensure your site continues to operate as expected.

Sites which have not upgraded to Tika 3 as of January 26, 2026, will be automatically upgraded. Setting tika_version: 1 in pantheon.yml will be ignored after that date. Symlinks from the 1.xx jar filepaths (/srv/bin/tika-app-1.xx.jar) will point to the new Tika 3 jar (/opt/pantheon/tika/tika.jar). These symlinks will be removed later in 2026.