Drupal 8 on Pantheon

Drupal 8 reaches its full potential on Pantheon. Pantheon's workflow—combined with Multidev and Drupal 8's configuration management—is the modern way to develop.

Just getting started? 

• Rest easy—we’ve been deploying on PHP 5.5 for years. Our platform is built to handle all that Drupal 8 has to offer.  
• Run Drupal 8 alongside all your other sites from a single dashboard—toggling between environments to keep your old projects. Our container-based platform will ensure you’re running the right versions of PHP for any Drupal site. 
• Drupal 8 was designed with workflow-centric platforms in mind. We designed Pantheon with workflow and best practices built in.
• We support Drush 8, the only Drush version that works with the latest Drupal. 

Get all of the value out of Drupal 8 by using the platform that runs the most modern stack. 

Drupal 8 is the biggest and most significant update in Drupal history. Drupal 8 sets a new standard for ease of use, and allows users to create and deploy content in a whole new way. 

• Mobile-first: Content looks beautiful on all devices, out of the box.
• New configuration management: Manage site configuration via version control: export, import, share and merge.
• A better authoring experience: Manage your content easily with the bundled CKEditor WYSIWYG editor and the ability to edit in-place.
• Views in Core: Customize all your views—the front page, listing blocks, admin pages, filters, and create your own custom listings without installing any additional code.
• Multilingual capabilities: Reach a global audience through translating with built-in user interfaces.
• HTML 5 based-markup: Apply core updates quickly and with confidence.
• Built-in web services: Use Drupal as a REST API for mobile apps, decoupled frontends, and more.
• Flexible and fast theming: Use the Twig template engine to build beautiful sites easily and quickly.
• Object-oriented programming: Welcoming non-Drupal developers with an industry standard approach.
• Strong accessibility features: Support for standard accessibility technologies means optimal user experience.

Drush and the Drupal Console are both command line tools that make administration and development tasks for Drupal websites much faster. In Drupal 8, these tools will improve your workflow by providing a wide arsenal of commands to speed up your ability to build and maintain sites.

TWIG Templating

Twig replaced PHPTemplate in Drupal 8 as its default template engine. Part of the Symfony2 framework, Twig provides a lot of new functionality. It’s flexible and fast, allowing developers to create their own custom tags and filters and reduces the majority of overhead related to regular PHP code by compiling templates down to plain optimized PHP. Twig also comes with a sandbox mode to safely modify template design. It’s a developer-friendly templating engine that’s already being used in several popular open-source projects. Learn more about why Twig became the new template engine for D8.

Decoupled Architecture

Decoupled architecture has never been easier than with Drupal 8, which ships with a RESTful API built into Core. It lets frontend developers experiment with various JavaScript frameworks, iOS apps, or even other content management systems to be innovative with the UI but rely on Drupal’s powerful backend. Learn more about decoupled CMS.

Panels & Page Manager

Drupal 8 core is great for managing lots and lots of content. Users can choose new Content types, add arbitrary Fields, and then create endless pieces of content of that type. However, when it comes to creating one­-off landing pages or applying custom layouts, Panels and Page Manager are still the way to go.

The Panels module gives Drupal site administrators the ability to create customized layouts for various uses. Its drag and drop interface allows users to visually design a page layout and organize content within it. The architecture of Panels in Drupal 8 is largely the same as in Drupal 7, with some shifting in certain functionality and module responsibility. Learn more >

• ​Forum One + Fairfax County Public Schools: Learn why Forum One relies on Pantheon to help administer FCPS’ large network of individual school sites using Pantheon and Drupal 8. The check out this post for the details on how Pantheon's custom upstreams made this project possible. 
• Last Call Media + Rainforest Alliance: Learn how Last Call Media built a complex Drupal 8 site for the Rainforest Alliance, using agile workflows on Pantheon to beat time and resource constraints.
• Palantir + The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco needed the ability to spin up unique microsites for museum exhibits to extend the experience beyond museum walls. Learn how and why they chose to do so with Drupal 8 on Pantheon. 
• Chapter Three + HDR: Learn how architecture company HDR upgraded their outdated site to a global web presence with faster performance and room to grow, using Drupal 8 on Pantheon.

• Major Version Drupal Upgrades: Instructions on how to upgrade your Pantheon site to the next major version of Drupal.
• Using GitHub Pull Requests with Composer, Circle CI, and Drupal 8: This guide describes how to use build tools such as GitHub and CircleCI with Composer to implement a collaborative, team-based Continuous Integration workflow using Pull Requests for Drupal 8 sites on Pantheon. 
• PhpStorm for Composer Managed Drupal 8 Sites: Learn how to configure JetBrains PhpStorm for Pantheon sites managed with Composer using a GitHub Pull Request workflow.
• Configuration Workflow for Drupal 8 Sites: Configure your Drupal site's performance and caching settings to make significant improvements.
• Drupal Commerce on Drupal 8: Use Composer to Install Drupal Commerce with Drupal 8.