Pantheon release notes

WordPress 6.5.3 is now available on the platform.

Highlights

• 12 bug fixes in Core
• 9 bug fixes for the block editor

You can review a summary of all the updates in the 6.5.3 release candidate announcement.

The New Relic PHP agent has been updated to the latest version (v10.19.0.9). Compared with the previously available version on the platform (v10.10.0.1), some of the changes and fixes include:

• Drupal 9.4+ now reports hooks and modules (see below for more details)
• Resolved erroneous deprecation warnings for PHP 8.1+
• Support for PHP 8.3

See the complete New Relic PHP agent changelog for more details.

Learn More about New Relic, real-time performance monitoring for your Pantheon web applications.

Action Required: Default behavior of New Relic Drupal metrics has changed

Pantheon no longer supports Drupal-specific metrics in New Relic by default. However, the functionality is still available. If this is crucial for troubleshooting your sites, please add these lines to your site’s pantheon.yml file to enable this reporting:

Our support team is happy to help if you have any questions or need assistance.

Effective May 1, 2024, Pantheon began to enforce a monthly limit of synthetics checks for each Pantheon account (excluding ping checks).

• Each Pantheon account can run up to 10,000 New Relic synthetic checks per month (unlimited number of ping checks).
• Pantheon provides a monthly shared number of synthetic checks for all Pantheon customers.
• To ensure that all Pantheon users can use Synthetics, we ask customers to reduce their checks to <10,000 per month per Pantheon account.
• After May 1, 2024, Pantheon will take action by reducing the number of synthetic checks in Pantheon accounts exceeding 10,000 checks per month.
• Pantheon will not delete synthetic monitors or historical data but will reduce the frequency and the number of locations where a synthetics monitor orginates from.

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.

We're announcing Workflow Logs, a powerful new feature for enhanced visibility and troubleshooting operations on the Pantheon platform. The feature can be accessed directly from your site dashboard, adjacent to the Support tab.

Key features

• Status overview: View key information on the status of workflows, including progress statuses, along with additional details such as start time, end time, initiating team member, and environment.
• In-depth details: Access code sync, error details, build logs, and Quicksilver posted messages from the expandable sections.
• Filtering: The workflows displayed comprise a curated list of user-relevant workflows. Further narrow your focus by utilizing filters to quickly find specific workflows by environment or completion status.
• Archiving: Export all visible workflows to a CSV file for archival purposes with the 'Download to CSV' button.

View all features

Request early access

If you're interested in getting early access to Workflow Logs, we invite you to join our early access program. Simply fill out the request form to apply. This will allow you to start using the feature and provide us with valuable feedback to help improve it further.

Our team will continuously enhance Workflow Logs through a planned list of improvements as well as collected feedback throughout the early access program.

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.

Following our announcement of the New Relic PHP agent update on the platform, we are now recommending PHP 8.3 for WordPress & Drupal applications on the platform. PHP 8.1 and 8.2 are still marked as "recommended" as well because it is common for plugins and modules in the ecosystem of still have incompatibilities or other issues with newer versions of PHP.

Try out your site with a newer version of PHP by updating your pantheon.yml file in a Dev or Multidev environment. Depending on your application's usage of modules/plugins, you may want to wait for full compatibility of your software before upgrading to PHP 8.3. By spinning up a Multidev and testing your site with PHP 8.3, you can determine if your site is ready for the upgrade.

Drupal added support for PHP 8.3 with version 10.2. Drupal 11.0 also supports PHP 8.3. See the full Drupal PHP compatibility chart.

WordPress added "beta support" for PHP 8.3 with WordPress 6.4. See the full WordPress PHP compatibility chart.