Pantheon release notes

The latest update, v1.4.5, of the Pantheon MU Plugin is now available. This update will be included with the upcoming WordPress 6.6.1 release.

What's new?

This update introduces a filter to the WordPress Multisite Network Setup page for subdirectory multisite installations with a custom wp-content directory. Previously, WordPress showed a warning that a custom wp-content directory might not be supported by subdirectory multisites. However, this warning does not apply to our WordPress (Composer Managed) upstream, which is powered by Bedrock. Our MU plugin has a customized version of the WordPress core file that renders this page. To address this, we've added a new function and filter (pantheon.enable_subdirectory_networks_message) that lets us (and you!) disable the warning when it's irrelevant.

The next update to the WordPress (Composer Managed) upstream will include this filter from the MU plugin.

For more information about WordPress (Composer Managed) refer to our WordPress and Composer documentation.

Pantheon has updated the default PHP version for WordPress, Drupal 7, and Drupal Composer Managed upstreams to PHP 8.2, replacing the previous default of PHP 8.1.

Please note that PHP 8.1 is now only receiving security support and will reach its End of Life in December 2025.

If you maintain a custom upstream, this change will not be reflected in pantheon.upstream.yml unless you update your fork from Pantheon's upstream.

We recommend thoroughly testing this core update before deploying it to the Live environment. If your site requires an older version of PHP or if you wish to upgrade to PHP 8.3, please refer to Pantheon’s documentation on how to manage PHP versions via the pantheon.yml configuration file.

The latest version of WordPress, 6.6 (Dorsey), became available on Pantheon as of July 16, 2024.

Action required

Upgrade to WordPress 6.6 right from your Pantheon dashboard or Terminus for the latest features, fixes, and security enhancements. See related documentation for how to apply core updates.

Highlights

• New design options for the Block Editor, including color or font sets, as well as a new previous experience for pages in the site editor.
• Maintenance and quality updates to the Interactivity API.
• A number of updates to working with themes, including a new Theme.json version due to breaking changes.
• Support for PHP 7.0 and 7.1 was dropped. The new minimum supported version of PHP will be 7.2.24. Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 or above.

For full details about WordPress 6.6, see the release notes or the WordPress 6.6 Field Guide.

The New Relic PHP agent has been updated to the latest version, v10.22.0.12. This update brings several enhancements and fixes compared to the previous version, v10.19.0.9. Key changes include:

• Official support for Drupal 10 from New Relic

For a detailed list of all changes and improvements, see the complete New Relic PHP agent changelog.

Learn how New Relic's real-time performance monitoring can help you with metrics and reports on your Pantheon web applications.

PHP 8.2.21 and 8.3.9 were released on the platform. They contain the latest bug fixes for PHP.

As a reminder, PHP 8.0 reached End-of-Life and PHP 8.1 was moved to security-only updates on 26 November 2023. PHP 8.1 will reach End-of-Life in December 2025. For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 and above.

• PHP Supported Versions

We’re excited to announce the rollout of the RSS feed subscription feature. This enhancement will enable you to stay updated with the latest release notes directly in your preferred RSS reader.

Key features

• Receive real-time notifications when new release notes are available.
• View all the latest release notes in your RSS reader.

How to get started

1. Select the Subscribe to RSS feed link on the Pantheon release notes homepage.
2. Choose your preferred RSS reader to follow us.

We hope this new feature enhances your experience and keeps you well-informed. Thank you for your continued support!

The update is now available for the WordPress (composer managed) upstream. This release includes several bug fixes and stability enhancements aimed at improving performance across all sites using this upstream.

Highlights

• Various updates and enhancements to the helpers.sh script handling the Sage theme installation script.
• Filter for WordPress core resource URLs (for JavaScript and CSS files provided by core) to resolve broken links on subdirectory subsites.
• Filter to drop a /wp path appended to WordPress-generated home URLs on single sites and main sites of multisites, both set at priority 9 for easy override in composer-managed sites.
• Un-ignored managed WordPress core files in the WordPress root directory. (Props @araphiel for the PR.)
• Updated default PHP version to 8.2 and default database version to 10.6.
• Updated application.php and composer.json files to align with roots/bedrock v1.24.x.
• Deprecates wp-config-pantheon.php in favor of config/application.pantheon.php.

For more details, refer to the WordPress (Composer Managed) changelog.

Applying updates

If you run into merge conflicts with this update, you can manually resolve by running the following command:

For assistance with managing merge conflicts, refer to our documentation on auto-resolving via the dashboard or manually resolving via the command line.

Additional notes

This release of WordPress (composer managed) is indicated by an official release on GitHub. The changelog has been updated to include version numbers for better tracking of upstream iterations.

Pantheon has updated our platform robots.txt file to include Pope Tech, a popular WCAG compliance scanning tool. This change allows crawling via Pope Tech User Agents on platform and custom domains for non-live environments (Dev, Test, and Multidevs). The functionality and contents of our platform robots.txt file are documented here.