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:
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Pantheon has acquired StagingPilot, creating a clear pathway for us to offer automation for website updates through our WebOps platform. This acquisition includes not just StagingPilot’s outstanding technology, but also founder Nathan Tyler and his brother Phil, who have created the gold standard of automated CMS maintenance.
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.
In a recent webinar Aaron Baker, Associate Director of Content Strategy for ​​Harvard University Public Affairs and Communications, and Kyle Unzicker, Creative Director at Modern Tribe, walked through how they collaboratively transformed Harvard University's homepage.
Every engagement metric from content reach to conversions is downstream from site speed. Good performance means good user experience, and expectations are ever rising. Research from Google estimates that most sites lose half their mobile visitors while the page is loading.
In light of this, I wanted to see what the numbers actually showed for how our platform (and others) measured up. Speed is one of our core value propositions, but does Pantheon actually deliver?
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.
Using the HTTP Archive—presented by Google at WordCamp US—which tracks detailed performance data for hundreds of thousands of sites in the Alexa top 1M, I was able to show that the median WordPress site on Pantheon is 3x faster than elsewhere:
Today we’re excited to announce Pantheon’s new Australia, Canada, and European Union regions. Whether you need your WordPress or Drupal site to meet data residency requirements or have a performance use case not solved by caching requests through Pantheon’s Global CDN, we’ve got you covered. Now when you create a new site on Pantheon, you can select from one of four regions across the globe.
Update (April 17, 2023): In addition to our always included Global CDN, Pantheon now offers additional features and customizations with Advanced Global CDN, enabling delivery teams to shape customer experiences at all levels. With Advanced Global CDN, empower teams to independently manage multiple sites without using subdomains, drive growth through iteration, calibrate control over branding, and extend enterprise-grade security.