Pantheon release notes

We've updated our Terminus GitHub Action with the ability to share sessions across jobs to simplify and reduce the authentication overhead including any associated rate limiting when authenticating their machine token. These sessions are encrypted prior to being cached using industry standard AES-256 encryption, PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) algorithm, and increased iterations when deriving the encryption key. We've also updated to the latest versions of actions/checkout and actions/cache.

Some technical details:

• The session data is encrypted using OpenSSL with AES-256 and PBKDF2 before being cached.

• The session information is scoped to a workflow run, meaning re-running the same workflow will use existing cache (in case of a failure, etc) while new workflows create a new session.

The Pantheon Advanced Page Cache Module has received an update in the 2.2.0 release which resolves Issue #3337669 and provides some additional enhancements. Now, when any file is updated inside the Drupal File system, that file will have its edge cache cleared immediately and new content will be shown.

Some Technical Details:

• The cache clearing is specifically triggered by any action which invokes the update file hook.

• If the file is an image, all image styles will also have their edge cache entry cleared.

As part of our continued effort to provide the latest and best in secure software, PHP versions 7.1 and below will reach end-of-sale (EoS) on May 15, 2024. This means that sites created after May 15 will not be able to change their PHP version to PHP 7.1, 7.0, or any version of PHP 5. Sites created with custom upstreams using EoS PHP may also have unexpected behavior upon site creation.

Sites already running PHP 5, PHP 7.0, or PHP 7.1 will continue to run even after May 15.

PHP 7.1 was declared end-of-life (EoL) by the PHP Foundation on November 30, 2020, more than three years ago. PHP 5.6 reached EoL on December 31, 2018, more than five years ago. EoL software does not receive security or feature updates, and could expose sites to attack if any vulnerabilities or exploits are discovered.

Action required

Customers using custom upstreams with a PHP version less than 7.2 should update their custom upstreams by May 15 to avoid disruption. The current supported versions of PHP are 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3. Pantheon currently recommends at least PHP 8.1 for all production sites.

PHP 8.2.17 and 8.3.4 were released on the platform. They contain the latest bug fixes and security releases for PHP. As a reminder, PHP 8.0 reached End-of-Life on 26 November 2023. For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.1 and above.

Pantheon Advanced Page Cache v1.5.0 is now available on WordPress.org and GitHub. This release adds a new filter to make cache purges less aggressive and provide more flexibility for developers and the sites they maintain. You can learn about the filter in the plugin's README file which includes an example of how to use it.

Additionally, this update implements our recently updated WPUnit Helpers project to simplify PHP Unit tests as well as our recently developed Plugin Release Actions to automate steps in the release process.

You can read the full changelog in the GitHub release notes.

The latest version of Drupal 7, 7.100, became available on Pantheon as of March 8, 2024.

Highlights

• Announcements Module 7.100 includes the Annoucements module backported to Drupal 7. Please read the change record before updating if you do not want the module to be automatically enabled.
• PHP 8 Compatibility Bundled with Drupal 7's release is an update to Pantheon's Apache Solr module that fixes deprecation warnings with PHP 8.1+.
• Bug fixes and security hardening In addition to the Announcements module, the release includes a few bug fixes and feature improvements. No security fixes are included in this release. For full details, see the release notes on Drupal.org.

Upgrade your Drupal 7 site to Drupal 7.100 right from your Pantheon dashboard or Terminus.

WordPress 6.5 will add a new Font Library feature. The Font Library allows you to upload fonts from your computer or add any of the fonts available on Google's font library to your WordPress site. In anticipation of this, Pantheon has added a feature to our Pantheon MU Plugin to support the new Font Library feature. You can read more about the Font Library feature in our guide to using the Font Library on Pantheon.

We've recently modified the Pantheon wrapper around the WP-CLI executable to solve a number of interrelated issues that customers may have previously been experiencing and/or using workarounds to solve. We recommend reviewing your site's logs and resolve any PHP notices or warnings.

Problem

• Our WP-CLI wrapper included a hard-coded --url flag for all wp commands run on the platform (via Terminus, e.g. terminus remote:wp or terminus wp, or internal workflows that relied on WP-CLI like flushing cache or viewing the Status page in the dashboard).
• For WordPress Multisites, the hard-coded --url flag pointed to the Pantheon platform domain (*.pantheonsite.io) instead of the actual domain of the site resulting in errors and the command failing unless executed manually (via Terminus with the correct --url flag attached).

Solution

• We have implemented a solution that checks if a site is a WordPress Multisite. If so, we remove the hard-coded --url flag, allowing WP-CLI to operate normally.
• This change does not affect workflows that are properly passing the --url flag to WP-CLI commands via terminus (e.g. terminus wp <site>.<env> -- plugin list --url=<url>). Any WP-CLI flags passed after the -- in the terminus wp command will be passed through to and interpreted by WP-CLI.
• This change means that many sites that were previously unable to view their full Status page will now be able to do so, and flushing site cache via the button in the Pantheon dashboard on sites that previously were unable to or had errors in doing so should now work as expected. Any other workflows or processes that relied on WP-CLI will also benefit from this change.

Recommended action