Pantheon release notes: User interface

The Pantheon Customer Support page within the dashboard now supports the ability to search support tickets by both ticket ID number and subject line. You can locate the ticket you need and review updates from our support team easily.

As we embark on a new year, we're excited to unveil a transformation. This January marks the introduction of Pantheon release notes, a rebranding of our changelog. Our aim is to elevate your platform experience by providing even more valuable insights into product updates.

What's new?

• Enhanced visibility: Discover our improved interface with added tags to each release note, indicating their category and whether action is required. This feature ensures quick insights at a glance, making your navigation smoother.
• Filter functionality: Explore the convenience of our newly integrated filter functionality, allowing you to tailor your release note view based on specific tags. This feature ensures you get information that's most relevant to you.

What’s coming up?

Get ready for a streamlined and more dynamic experience with Pantheon release notes. We're committed to keeping you in the loop every step of the way, ensuring you stay informed about the latest.

• Frequent updates: Say goodbye to waiting for a monthly summary. We're shifting from the monthly retrospective model to publishing a release note for each significant update, providing you with real-time information.
• Proactive communication: This change supports more proactive communication. Now, any noteworthy change will be marked here, complementing other channels like blog posts and emails.

What lies ahead?

This is just the beginning! Stay tuned for more enhancements down the road as we continue to refine and elevate your Pantheon experience.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to a year filled with collaborative success.

Introducing proactive alerts tailored for directories with substantial file counts, which could impact performance or accessibility. Stay informed with timely notifications delivered directly to your dashboard and via email when file counts reach 50,000 and 100,000. This feature empowers you to efficiently manage your file system and address potential issues promptly.

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.

• As part of Pantheon’s commitment to accessibility, diversity, and inclusion, we are proud to announce that we have completed an external audit of our platform’s accessibility features and the results are available in our WCAG 2.1 AA VPAT.
• Our teams have ongoing efforts to improve accessibility further and have outlined goals to improve our support of WCAG 2.1 AA criteria for the next two quarters.
• Our partners and customers who depend on WCAG compliant products can confidently continue to use the platform knowing that we hold accessibility to be an important function of the services we provide.

Administrators of large workspaces will now be able to easily remove access for offboarded users at scale. When a member of your team changes jobs, or for whatever reason you need to remove a person from your sites, you can now do so faster

As you remove users from your workspace or site team, you will be prompted to remove access across all sites that a given user may be connected to, which can save multiple clicks and manual labor to ensure the right access levels are maintained.

To learn more about how this new offboarding process works, take a look at our documentation.

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'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.

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.

Helps Workspace Admins more effectively manage user access by providing the ability to offboard users from multiple sites in a single click.

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

With Launch Check, Pantheon customers can find out in seconds the health of their Drupal and WordPress websites - including best practices on site configurations. These reports are found in the Site Dashboard under the Status tab and are accessible by site team members. Recent updates to the "Status" dashboard include improved WordPress Multisite compatibility, as well as a security update to better prevent XSS attacks.

Cache Hit Ratio data is now available on the site Dashboard under the Live Environment's Metrics tab. A site's Cache Hit Ratio measures how efficiently the Global CDN is being leveraged to give users the fastest response time vs using a site's resources to process requests. This information has also been added to Terminus env:metrics command.

Enhancements to the Workspace dashboard allow admins greater visibility and control over user roles, access levels, and privileges. Now, admins can perform periodic audits of users and permissions by Site or Workspace, communicate development work to specific users by Site group, and quickly onboard and offboard users at the Workspace and Site level. To learn more about roles and permissions, refer to our documentation.

Pantheon’s new Enterprise Billing Center brings accessible and detailed reporting to you via the Pantheon Dashboard. Use the this feature to easily understand your invoices or to see engaging data visualizations that show how individual sites contribute to overall costs. To learn more about Pantheon’s Enterprise Billing Center, refer to our documentation.

The Workspace Index Service (WIS) is officially in Early Access. WIS aggregates sites from different site providers. This allows for better performance on site listings in the New Dashboard.

The Deactivate Autopilot feature is now available. You can now remove sites from your Autopilot-enabled list and ensure Autopilot is not used on sites that are incompatible.

Previously, users with the Unprivileged role were not able to create sites using Custom Upstreams. Users with the Unprivileged role do not possess permissions to access the Workspace Dashboard and could not create sites using Custom Upstreams. Now, it's possible to create a site using a Custom Upstream from the Personal Workspace in the New Dashboard. Click Create New Site and then select Upstream From Workspace.

The usability of Workspace Switcher in the New Dashboard has been improved. The switcher in the Primary Global Navigation is now optimized for large accounts and will allow users to search for a Workspace directly in the New Dashboard. You can view up to 10 Workspaces connected to your account, from the list in the Primary Global Navigation.

Localdev 0.10.0 has been released, including a new log and activity viewer, UX improvements, and bug fixes. For more information, see the Localdev documentation.

You now always have the capability to provision HTTPS before going live. DNS challenges are now also shown on the dashboard, which were previously only available via Terminus. For more see our Launch Essentials Guide.

We’ve made Multidev—our powerful tool for remote development—free of charge through July 1st. Multidev allows development teams to work asynchronously on projects in the cloud, unlocking collaboration, and increased productivity. To get started, visit the Multidev tab in your Pantheon dashboard.

Multidev is no longer a site-specific feature. It’s now enabled organization-wide for select account types. For more information, see Who has access to Multidev?

Over 200,000 sites are already on Pantheon's Global CDN, but if you still have sites pointing to the legacy, deprecated infrastructure, you can now see which sites need an upgrade from your User or Organization Dashboard. Find the required DNS information from the Domains / HTTPS tab on each site environment. Complete the upgrade as soon as possible, and let us know if you have any questions.

Global CDN now respects the no-store directive in the cache-control header.

On newly created sites, you are now directed to install your WordPress or Drupal CMS as the next step.

We’ve opened access to Custom Upstreams for all organizations on Pantheon. Read more about it on our blog, or give it a try.

These include improvements to selected states for environment tabs and menus to help keep you better oriented when moving through the UI, added white space to give everything some breathing room, and nested secondary menu items on the left side to streamline navigation.

Your User Dashboard now shows a screenshot of each site’s Dev environment and uses a default image if no screenshot is available. An update is triggered when clearing caches, deploying code, and cloning or importing database or files to Dev.

We added a Migrate Existing Site button to the User and Organization Dashboards to help guide you through the import process.

We changed the name of the tab to reduce ambiguity.

You can now rename your own Organization by going to the Settings tab.

If you’re a member of an Organization or Agency, you can now set your default login location to your user Dashboard or your Organization Dashboard. Change your default now.

The Multidev Dashboard now provides a progress bar after the environment creation modal disappears.

Single-sign on customers now have a dedicated log in page. Learn more about SAML For Pantheon Agencies.

• The People tab now shows gravatars for all users in an Organization
• Your framework (Drupal, WordPress) is displayed in the Site Dashboard header
• Users can now delete their own accounts in the Team tab
• Multidev creation is blocked when you have reached your site's Multidev limit