Have you had “the talk” with your clients? You know, the one where you tell them that if they are going to be doing it, they need to be safe. If they are going to collect private information or integrate external services like PayPal or MailChimp, it is time to sit down and have a discussion—about security. A company’s website is a portal to customer information, and if hacked, can lead to a very public breach resulting in loss of customers, fines, and brand damage.

Moving databases between environments is tough. Many things can break in the process, and a single issue can sink hours of your valuable time. Migrating WordPress databases between environments is especially tricky for two reasons:

Drupal configuration is the all-important glue that instructs the Drupal core and contrib code how to operate in the context of the current web application. In Drupal 7, there was no formal configuration API in core. The ctools contrib module provided an exportables API that was widely implemented, but was not universally supported. Drupal 8 has greatly improved on this state of affairs by providing the Configuration Management API in core. Now, configuration can be handled in a uniform and predictable way.

Pantheon often touts version control, namely Git, as one of the tools of successful developers. However, for the many developers out there currently not using Git, I am going to go out on a limb: you probably know about it, have tried it, and are doing just fine without it, thank you very much. Your customers are happy, sites are chugging along, and the last thing you need is a cryptic command-line tool to add complexity and slow your flow.

Let’s face it—nobody likes to rely on patches. A project is much easier to maintain when it is using standard versions of all of its dependencies. Without patches, a project can be kept up to date simply by running composer update. 

Today I’m excited to announce that Pantheon enforces HTTPS by default. For quite some time, HTTPS has been included for all Pantheon sites, but you’d need to do some extra work to make sure your site isn’t accessible over insecure HTTP. That’s changed as of today, thanks in part to the magic of Pantheon’s upstream model. Now it’s easier than ever to implement best practices, make your site and your visitors more secure, and to boost SEO.

Pantheon has always provided full page caching at our edge layer so that your HTML responses are served as fast as possible to your website's visitors, as well as handling huge spikes of traffic. Now with the launch of our Global CDN, those cached responses and their metadata go to 30+ points of presence worldwide. Responses from your site will come much faster when the caches are physically closer to your site visitors.