Pantheon release notes: Front-End Sites

The Pantheon Drupal Starter Kit for Front-End Sites has undergone significant improvements.

• Setup experience: The setup process is now more user-friendly and guided for a seamless experience.
• Health check script: The newly introduced health check script alerts you to known configuration issues before a build fails.
• Front-End Sites settings: Effortlessly navigate through the Settings page, simplifying the testing of your preview endpoint, and allowing convenient copying of environment variables for use in the Front-End Sites Dashboard.

Curious about creating a new Drupal project with these enhancements? Find detailed instructions here.

For further insights and discussions on similar sites, join the #front-end-frameworks Slack channel.

We've enhanced your site management experience by enabling the ability to delete Multidevs directly from your Front-End Sites dashboard. This upgrade simplifies project organization, providing you with a seamless process to remove unnecessary Multidevs.

This intuitive addition streamlines site management, offering a hassle-free solution to keep your projects organized and optimized. Find detailed instructions here.

Pantheon introduced a new build pipeline for Front End Sites to significantly improve build times. Beginning on November 13th, 2023, newly created sites are automatically using the new pipeline and cannot opt back to the old pipeline. Sites made prior to that date can opt-in to the new pipeline to take advantage of the new features. All pre-existing sites that do not opt-in will be switched over for new builds on or around January 15th.

Additionally, we are adding support for Node 18 (for dynamic sites) and 20 (for both static and dynamic sites). To select a specific version, Pantheon is moving away from using .nvmrc and will instead look to the “engines” field in your project’s package.json file.

To find out more about adopting the new pipeline, check out our documentation, and read our blog post about how we’re already experiencing the benefits of this internally at Pantheon.

The Pantheon Front-End Sites Settings page is now available for users of the WordPress for Front-End project. It provides a simplified post install experience where users can copy environment variables for use in the Front-End Sites dashboard, and also test their preview endpoint. Instructions for creating a new WordPress project can be found here. Want to chat more about these kinds of sites? Join the #front-end-frameworks Slack Channel.

We released version 1.0.5 of the WP Decoupled Preview plugin which contains a bug fix specific to WordPress 6.3. WP Decoupled Preview enables content editors to see their changes in the context of a front-end framework (served through Pantheon's Front-End Sites) like Next.js. To try this functionality, request access to Front-End Sites and follow our tutorial for spinning up our WordPress + Next.js starter.

Can you tell we want more teams to sign up for Front-End Sites? If you don't yet have access, as of the last month you'll now see callouts in the site creation flow that lead to Front-End Sites Access:

Thanks to efforts in the last month, once you spin up new codebases in Front-End Sites, you will also find:

• Newly improved readme files in your fresh projects.
• Health checks that fire early in the build process if your Front-End Site may be likely to fail due to missing variables for a back-end CMS
• A better navigation and search functionality for the Decoupled Kit project documentation.

Want to chat more about these kinds of sites? Join the #front-end-frameworks Slack Channel.

Pantheon Front-End Sites provide users with tools that improve the experience of building a decoupled site. Front-End Sites expedite the delivery of key functionality for site creation, accelerate time to value for new users, and improve development and editorial experiences. You can build a decoupled site on Pantheon using your own configuration or with one of our trusted development starter kits. To learn more about Front-End Sites, refer to our documentation.