Pantheon release notes

We're excited to announce that our documentation site has been seamlessly integrated with our brand-new design system. This enhancement brings a fresh and cohesive look to our documentation, providing a unified and visually appealing experience for our users. Explore the updated, improved, and more accessible Docs site today.

On September 20th, Drupal core updates were released to address a critical vulnerability in the JSON:API module. Those updates became immediately available within the Pantheon dashboard for one-click code updates. Additionally, our engineers updated our CDN to mitigate potential attacks.

If you have a Drupal site using JSON:API we suggest you update as soon as possible if you haven't done so already. And even if you aren't using JSON:API, it'll still feel good to apply an update, right? To better understand the nature of security updates, come watch the Pantheon YouTube Livestream on October 25th.

WordPress Multisites can now run automated Search and Replace when cloning the database between environments or spinning up new environments.

Subdomain Multisites can use a domain map to define the URLs between environments, or auto-convert to a subdirectory Multisite in non-live environments.

For more information, see Pantheon’s documentation on Search and Replace. Or join the #WordPress Slack Channel to connect with other Pantheon customers & super-users.

We released an update for the Solr Search for WordPress plugin which disables auto-commit by default and allows cron to push solr commits regularly instead.

This drastically improves the performance of large sites and avoids 503 errors related to hard committing on every update. This update is recommended for all WordPress sites currently running the plugin.

You can still enable auto-commit by explicitly setting SOLRPOWER_DISABLE_AUTOCOMMIT to false.

Pantheon has deployed PHP versions 8.2.9, 8.1.22, and 8.0.30 to customer sites running on the platform. These releases address vulnerabilities disclosed in CVE-2023-3823 and CVE-2023-3824.

If you are using PHP 8.2, 8.1 or 8.0, there is nothing further that you need to do. If you are still on PHP 7.4 or earlier, though, you should schedule some time to upgrade to a supported version.While the vulnerabilities patched in these latest releases are not reported to affect PHP 7.4, the fact remains that there could be (and probably are) unpatched vulnerabilities in the end-of-life versions. Read more about it in Greg Anderson’s blog post.

We released an update for the Pantheon Advanced Page Cache WordPress plugin which adds a filter to allow disabling surrogate keys for posts' taxonomy terms. This can be especially helpful for posts with large numbers of taxonomies (such as WooCommerce products with a large number of global attributes).

For more information, see Pantheon documentation.

WordPress sites can now leverage an upgraded object caching solution on Pantheon! Object Cache Pro is a highly optimized premium WordPress plugin that integrates with Redis for business class performance. Find out more about our perspective Object Caching from Steve Persch, Director of Developer Experience.

See Pantheon’s documentation for instructions on how to enable Object Cache Pro. Or join the #WordPress Slack Channel to connect with other customers using Object Cache Pro.

Pantheon has pushed an update to WordPress and Drupal 7 core upstreams which sets PHP 8.1 as the new default PHP version, rather than 7.4.

Please test this core update thoroughly before deploying to the Live environment. If your site requires an older version of PHP, or if you'd like to upgrade to PHP 8.2, see Pantheon’s documentation on how to manage PHP versions via the pantheon.yml configuration file.