Pantheon release notes

On April 26th, 2024 Pantheon will begin consolidating the channels in our Community Slack instance and convert members to single-channel guests of the #general channel. All other public channels will be archived.

In many cases, the benefits of separate channels come with substantial and increasing monetary costs as well as downsides for participants. Pantheon is unique in our level of support for both WordPress and Drupal. We want a free-flowing exchange of ideas between those communities. Steering conversions to separate #wordpress and #drupal channels as we have in the past works against that benefit.

Some other channels have specific corresponding GitHub repositories that are suited to the tracking of complex topics or bug reports rather than discussion in the #general channel

• Our Decoupled Kit repo which holds much of our integration code used to connect WordPress and Drupal to Next.js and Gatsby can track questions or bug reports that often surfaced in the #front-end-frameworks channel.
• The #search channel often held discussion that corresponds to our Drupal module and WordPress plugin that provide search functionality.
• The #secrets-management channel exists to discuss Pantheon's new Secrets Management functionality that is currently in Early Access and has a waiting list for more customers. In many instances, the issue queue for the Terminus plugin required to use this feature is the appropriate place to hold questions.

FAQs

What is Changing in Community Slack?

Pantheon will be consolidating the channels in Community Slack and transitioning all members to single-channel guests in the #general channel. All other public channels will be archived. This transition will be completed between April 26th and April 30th.

How Will This Change Alter the Experience for Existing Community Members?

Starting Tuesday, April 30th, all Community Slack Members will receive a notification that their account has been transitioned to a "single-channel guest" account. Community members do not need to take any action. Once this process is finalized, they will only be granted access to the #general channel in Community Slack.

When Can I Expect This Change to Take Place?

We'll post a final message in every channel on April 25th as a heads-up before we begin archiving channels. On April 26th, we'll begin the archiving process. At this time all channels will be archived except for #general.

Will the General Channel Become Too Noisy?

The #general channel is already the most active channel by far. We anticipate that this change will approximately double the volume of posts and threads in the #general channel. However, we don't foresee this increase overwhelming ongoing conversations, especially since discussions often occur within threads.

Will I Be Able to Search Through All of The Slack History?

After all community members have been transitioned to single-channel guests in the #general channel, they will have limited access, only able to search the history of that channel. However, Pantheon employees will retain access to conversations in archived channels and can access that history as needed.

Will I Still Have the Ability to Send Direct Messages to Other Members?

Yes, you'll still be able to send direct messages to other users within Community Slack.

Given There Is No Longer a Dedicated Channel for Submitting Product Feedback and Feature Requests, Where Do I Submit This?

We welcome all product feedback and suggestions! Please continue to share those with our team in the #general channel, and we will make sure your feedback gets passed along to the appropriate teams. As always, if you see product feedback you like, give it a thumbs up! This helps us gauge the demand for specific products or features.

Additionally, we'll explore automations and integrations to ensure that threads discussing specific topics, such as product feedback, are comprehensively captured with minimal effort.

Will There Be Guidelines or Best Practices for Using the Consolidated Channel Effectively?

To maintain organization within the consolidated Slack channel, we encourage the use of threaded conversations to keep discussions organized. Our team will continue to monitor this channel regularly to ensure discussions stay on topic and address any issues promptly. In the near future, we will look into leveraging automations and integrations to streamline processes and ensure that relevant information is captured and organized efficiently.

If My Question Goes Unanswered in Slack, Where Else Can I Seek Additional Support?

We are committed to supporting you every step of the way! Join us for Office Hours every Wednesday at 2 pm ET / 11 am PT, where one of our Pantheon experts will be available to assist you with any questions you may have. If there's a particular topic you're eager to learn more about let us know, and we'll arrange a Topic-specific Zoom Office Hours session.We believe that scheduling video calls for topics such as Terminus or Upstreams will enable us to share the expertise of power users more effectively. To request topic-specific office hours, simply email us at community@pantheon.io.

For urgent issues, please open a chat or submit a support ticket.

How Will Conversations Cross-Link Between Slack and Other Places Like Github?

While there are several automated tools we are considering, Pantheon staff will first proactively monitor discussions in the consolidated #general channel, and when appropriate, find or create relevant issues in GitHub repos or elsewhere and share those links in discussion threads. When the topic of discussion is a bug or a feature request related to an open source tool, our product and engineering team can more effectively respond to issues and tickets than they can to one or more Slack threads.

Will There Be Opportunities for Feedback or Suggestions Regarding the Consolidated Channel?

Absolutely! As we look to improve the functionality and experience here in Community Slack we welcome all feedback and suggestions. You can share your thoughts with our team by emailing community@pantheon.io or by attending regularly scheduled Office Hours on Zoom (Wednesday at 2 pm ET / 11 am PT)

Have you considered other tools like Discord or GitHub Discussions?

As we have reviewed the norms among similar companies and communities we have seen a few changes since our Pantheon Community Slack was created in 2016. First, we remember that the creation of our Community Slack in 2016 very quickly drew the attention and activity that had previously gone into our "Power Users Google Group," which generated many messages every day in the pre-Slack era.

Pantheon Community Slack has been a vibrant space because practically everyone there was already in other Slacks. That does not appear to be true for Discord. While Discord's functionality overlaps heavily with Slack, the population of users does not. The social norms of the larger communities we operate in (web development agencies, WordPress, Drupal, Higher Education) meant that a very high percentage of Pantheon users were already in at least one Slack workspace (if not a dozen). We could expect people to join another workspace in the Slack app they already had installed on their computers. We wouldn't expect traction asking people to download a new app like Discord for the first time.

On the other hand, many of our most active community members do have GitHub accounts. For the immediate future, we are steering discussions toward GitHub's long-standing convention of Issues which are meant for tracking specific topics that often lead to specific changes within a specific code repository.

In the years since we at Pantheon developed many of our tools and practices, GitHub has added more community-centric tools like Discussions for conversations that may not start with the specificity implied by Issues. We see many of our peer companies using GitHub Discussions and will evaluate if and how Pantheon could leverage this tool to more effectively serve our community.

An update is now available for the WordPress (Composer Managed) upstream to resolve a particular log message that started appearing after our WP-CLI wrapper update in February.

This update adds a new file to the /config directory, application.pantheon.php. In order to accomodate this new file, a line has been added to config/application.php to load the config/application.pantheon.php file. If you have made modifications to your config/application.php, it's possible you may run into conflicts with this update. If this is the case, you can manually resolve by running the following command:

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

Technical Details

The application.pantheon.php file curently contains code to check for a defined WP_HOME value in the site's .env file. If the value is undefined or no .env file is being used, values for WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL are defined. This can be overridden by either adding values to the site's .env file or adding putenv( 'WP_HOME=https://example.com' ); and putenv( 'WP_SITEURL=https://example.com' ); to your application.php file.

Why the change?

Roots Bedrock makes heavy use of environment variables. We made an intentional decision to not rely on .env files in order to reduce overall complexity. This left WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL undefined in the application.php file except in local development with Lando. In most cases, WordPress is intelligent enough to use the database values for home and siteurl for normal interactions, however, this caused problems with WP-CLI operations. The addition of a new application.pantheon.php file allows us to define those values if they are not already while still allowing them to be overridden for more complex environments.

PHP 8.1.28, 8.2.18, and 8.3.6 were released on the platform. They contain the latest bug fixes and security releases for PHP.

Updates include patches for the following CVEs ( Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures):

• CVE-2024-1874 "Command injection via array-ish $command parameter of proc_open even if bypass_shell option enabled on Windows"
• CVE-2024-2756 "__Host-/__Secure- cookie bypass due to partial CVE-2022-31629 fix"
• CVE-2024-3096 "password_verify can erroneously return true, opening ATO risk"
• CVE-2024-2757 "mb_encode_mimeheader runs endlessly for some inputs" (PHP 8.3 only)

As a reminder, PHP 8.0 reached End-of-Life on 26 November 2023. For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 and above.

The latest version of WordPress, 6.5.2, became available on Pantheon as of April 10, 2024.

Highlights

• Security updates: Addressed one security vulnerabilities in the Avatar block type.
• 2 bug fixes in Core
• 12 bug fixes in the Block Editor

What happened to 6.5.1?

6.5.2 is the first minor release for WordPress 6.5 rather than 6.5.1. Yesterday, it was disclosed on the Make WordPress Core development site that due to an error with the initial package, 6.5.1 could not be released.

Upgrade to WordPress 6.5.2 right from your Pantheon dashboard or Terminus for added security.

We are thrilled to announce that on April 23, 2024, we will upgrade the New Relic PHP agent to the latest version (v10.19.0.9). This update is part of our ongoing commitment to enhancing your experience with Pantheon and ensuring that our offerings meet your evolving needs.

By staying up-to-date with the latest agent, you will benefit from improved performance and enhanced troubleshooting capabilities for your WordPress and Drupal instances. This means smoother experiences for your site visitors and more efficient workflows for you. This new version also fully supports PHP 8.3, providing you with the latest features and compatibility.

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

Action Required: Default behavior of New Relic Drupal Hooks is changing

After the release of this agent update, Pantheon will no longer support Drupal Hooks reporting 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:

The parameter above will take effect when the New Relic PHP agent is updated for your site.

If your site currently reports Drupal Hooks information to New Relic, you will need to add the above line to your pantheon.yml file before the April 23 update to maintain this reporting moving forward.

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

The latest version of WordPress, 6.5 (Regina), became available on Pantheon as of April 2, 2024.

Highlights

Font Library

• WordPress 6.5 introduces the new Font Library. This feature allows you to upload fonts to your WordPress site or install any of the fonts available from Google's font library.
• Previously, in version 1.3.3 of our Pantheon MU Plugin, we added support for the new Font Library feature by explicitly defining where fonts are stored to support this new feature.
• For more information, refer to our documentation.

Interactivity API

• WordPress 6.5 also adds a new Interactivity API. This API establishes a standardized way to add interactive elements to Gutenberg blocks.

Performant Translations

• A new localization system has been introduced in WordPress 6.5 to improve the performance of translations. This system uses a new file format, .l10n.php, to store translations in addition to the standard .mo and .po files you may already be familiar with. When .l10n.php files exist, they are loaded instead, providing significant performance improvements and using less memory.
• For more information about Performant Translations on Pantheon and how to generate .l10n.php files if they do not exist, see our Performant Translations guide.

Plugin Dependencies

• WordPress plugins can now have dependencies on other plugins. This allows plugin authors to specify that their plugin requires another plugin to be installed and activated in order to work properly. A new Requires Plugins Plugin Header has been introduced to require other plugins to be installed and activated before the current plugin can be activated and prevent plugins that are dependent upon other plugins to be deactivated accidentally. For more information, see the Plugin Dependencies dev note.

...And More

• For full details about WordPress 6.5, see the release notes or the WordPress 6.5 Field Guide.

What is changing?

Great news! Pantheon is simplifying the way we calculate and apply site visit overages. This change will help reduce excess billing and unplanned costs should a site exceed its plan limits.

This change is effective for site visits on or after January 1, 2024. In order to transition to the new overages model and allow you, the customer, to digest this change Pantheon will not run an overages process in February 2024. This new program will be formally launched in March 2024 and the initial month’s processing will encompass usage from January and February of 2024.

The new overage charge policy

Effective for usage starting on January 1, 2024, overages will be billed $40 for each 10,000 unique site visits (a unique site visit is defined as a specific IP address and user agent combination over a 24-hour period) or portion thereof that exceeds the amount of included unique visits in the subscription. This applies uniformly to all sites running on the platform at all subscription levels.

In addition, with Overage Protection, all Pantheon customers, except for Basic plans and monthly subscriptions, will have one month of overages waived every 12 months during the subscription term. For simplicity, the 12-month period will follow a calendar year running from January through December. This Overage Protection will be applied automatically on the first month of each plan year where your site is over the included unique visits in the subscription- you do not have to do a thing.

Lastly, for new customers coming onto the platform for the first time there will be a three-month grace period starting with your service start date (the day a site is first moved from a Sandbox to a commercial plan) where no overages will be incurred. This allows you the time to get calibrated on the platform and focus on what is most important: the successful launch of your web site(s) on Pantheon!

The prior overage charge policy

Prior to this change, if a site exceeded the unique site visits included in the subscription plan, the plan would be automatically upgraded to a higher plan level that was a better fit for the amount of unique site visits. Many times that increase would result in a surprise to customers, who hadn’t budgeted for increasing the plan for the remainder of the subscription term, and the cost would be more than what customers thought was fair. We listened, and we’re making this change to make Pantheon a brand you trust even more.

Will you show me an example of how this works?

Example scenario

Assume you purchase an annual Performance Small plan that includes 25,000 unique monthly site visits starting October 1st. The cost of a Performance Small plan is $160 per month (paid annually). Note that the next plan level up is a Performance Medium plan that includes 50,000 unique monthly site visits is $275 per month (paid annually).

During the holiday season, you have 40,000 unique site visits in November and 45,000 in December, before returning to less than 25,000 monthly unique site visits during the rest of your contract term (Jan-Sep).

Overage fee under the new policy

Under the new policy, you will simply pay a one-time fee of: $ 0 for November’s extra 15,000 visits because Overage Protection allows 1 free month of overages, and $ 80 for December’s extra 20,000 visits.

Overage fee under the old policy

Because you exceeded the plan limits of 25,000 for two consecutive months, under the old policy your plan would have been automatically upgraded to the Performance Medium plan starting in December. This would have increased your monthly cost from $160 to $275 a month, or an additional $115 per month. Since the plan change occurred in December and you still had 9 months remaining on your term, this increase would have cost $1,035 extra, which would be charged to your credit card in January or you would have received an additional invoice for plans on contract.

Comparison of the new vs. old overage fee

As you can see in this example, the new overage fee is a total of $80 vs. the cost for the upgraded plan under the prior policy would have increased your cost $1,035 –- the new policy saves you 92%!

Updated documentation

We've updated our Overage Policy documentation to align with the new policy and provide more specifics, such as additional benefits for new site launches and qualifying nonprofit organizations.

On March 25, 2024, it was announced in the WordPress development blog that the default storage location for the Font Library (added in WordPress 6.5) will be wp-content/uploads/fonts. Previously, we had added a feature to our Pantheon MU Plugin to support the new Font Library feature by changing the previous default path (wp-content/fonts) to wp-content/uploads/fonts. This change to our MU plugin removes that override as it is no longer necessary. You can read more about the Font Library feature in our guide to using the Font Library on Pantheon.