Even the best development shops do it once in awhile.
The client’s complex site has been launched. The client is happy. New features are being built on a predictable sprint schedule. Feature branches are being merged to master. And then that urgent ticket arrives. A small change must be deployed to the live site and it must be deployed NOW. It’s Friday afternoon. It’s time for a hotfix.
The request could be any number of urgent needs:
Today we’re happy to announce that Multizone Failover is available for Pantheon Elite sites. While we can’t prevent disasters from happening, Pantheon has architected a high-availability (HA) solution with intelligent failover at the Global CDN edge layer to keep mission critical websites online in the event of a complete datacenter outage.
PHP is going through a renaissance, and a big part of it is the Composer package manager, which makes it easy to share common libraries of code between projects.
One of the most commonly documented ways for a PHP command line tool to be installed is via the composer global require command. This command is easy to document and easy to run, which explains its popularity. Unfortunately, this convenient function has a darker side that can cause some pretty big problems. The root of the problem is that Composer, by design, manages dependencies on a per-project basis; however, the global command installs everything into a common central project.
Today we’re happy to announce PHP 7.3 is the default version for new WordPress and Drupal 8 sites! Speed up your existing site by applying the 1-click update from your Pantheon site dashboard. You can update with confidence using Pantheon’s Dev, Test, Live workflow because PHP version is managed in version control and deployed along with the rest of your code. If for some reason you want to keep using a different version, you can override via pantheon.yml.
We get questions almost every day about Drupal multisite. In our experience, Drupal multisite does not meet the needs of organizations looking for a successful technology solution to manage dozens/hundreds/thousands of websites.
For anyone new to the terminology, a multisite is where you set Drupal up to connect to different databases depending on the incoming url, which allows one instance of Drupal to serve different sites under different domain names.
Many development teams use pull requests as a pillar of their development workflow. Pull requests are a formalized way of reviewing and merging a proposed set of changes to a codebase. Last month I hosted a webinar on Continuous Integration with Rob Bayliss of Last Call Media, and we discussed the ways his team uses pull requests in their projects.
We’ve recently been working with agencies to migrate their existing projects from custom, shared, and clustered LAMP stacks to the Pantheon platform. In practice, this process is 95% forensic. You can’t rely on naming conventions or first appearances, only on manually tracing DNS to Apache virtual host configuration to a webroot to configuration files. Why infrastructure ends up that way is clear, though: different sites have different needs for scale and availability, and we’ve delivered that in the past by deploying each site alongside some cohort with similar needs.
If you are not familiar with Composer yet, see the Composer Tools and Frameworks for Drupal presentation that Doug Dobrzyncski and I did for DrupalCon LA. It’s easy to get started quickly with Composer today with starter projects such as
Web development is better together. As we create increasingly ambitious digital experiences and build more mission-critical web presences, the number of people working together on these projects grows. Fading are the days where the list of everything you need to make a website can fit on the back of a postcard. Instead, modern web projects require the efforts of multiple people working closely together in a collaborative fashion.