Let’s start this blog post about Drupal training in an unconventional way: by talking about how much I like WordPress. 

WebOps is How For most companies today, virtually all marketing roads lead to a website: the email campaigns, landing pages on third-party sites, mobile apps, SEO, the paid online ads. Even direct mail relies on a URL as the call to action these days. This is all great, except that for so many marketing organizations their website is their greatest nemesis.

Most executives understand how important their website is to their business and why it’s critical to take the same iterative, results-driven approach to managing their website that they take with the rest of digital marketing. Yet most website teams are stuck in a ditch, making little to no forward progress, while everyone around them grows more and more frustrated. Eventually this leads to executives essentially giving up on the website as a means to drive the business and finding ways to work around it. Why?

When the first beta of Gutenberg was made available for testing, one of the most controversial decisions was that the default storage for block attributes is the HTML to saved in post content. Block attributes—the settings on blocks—can be stored in post meta or other locations, but the system most core blocks use is to save the data as HTML, as the end user will view it, or to serialize it to comments. For example, to slightly oversimplify how the core paragraph block works, in post content, you have some HTML like this:

If you’re a marketing leader, empowering your web teams with the technology to quickly iterate and deliver a great customer experience is one of the most important investments you can make in today’s digitally driven business environment. In fact, a handful of fortune 500 companies have gone on record to say that agile is the path forward for the marketing function.

I joined Pantheon in September of 2015, two months before the release of Drupal 8.0.0. I had spent many years building client sites in Drupal 5, 6 and 7. Now I was starting a job where I would talk a lot about building Drupal 8 sites on Pantheon. To stay sharp, I felt like I had to actually build a Drupal 8 site on Pantheon. Moreover, I wanted to have high confidence that I was doing it right. 

This is a companion blog post to the conference talk I gave at the JavaScript for WordPress conference, online on July 12th, 2019. If you missed the talk or want to bookmark the recap and links, read on.

Being an entrepreneur is often about accomplishing more with less. When it comes time to develop a website for your business, you can benefit from that same entrepreneurial approach. Instead of going straight for tools such as Optimizely or Crazy Egg, which require meaningful traffic to produce actionable results, start with user testing.

When people don’t get what they want, they get cranky. When expectations are set, we want them to be met—especially when business is on the line. So, if you’re about to embark on a new website project for a customer, you want to make sure you have a plan in place, as well as have a detailed understanding of your customer’s background, current state, and future goals.

Pantheon was proud to sponsor and participate in WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin, June 20-22, 2019.  Our Developer Programs Engineer Andrew Taylor had a chance to sit down with Alain Schlesser, founder of Bright Nucleus and current maintainer of the WordPress Command Line Interface project, or as it is better known, the WP-CLI.

In the not-so-distant past, minute-long TV spots ruled advertising. Captive audiences watched whatever the advertiser decided to show. After all, there was no commercial-free alternative like Netflix and no smartphones to divert attention. With such a large audience, advertisers bet big on these spots, knowing that they'd be shown again and again to people without any alternative.

As a Developer Advocate, I work with web development teams on improving their workflows. That often means discussing how to adopt Continuous Integration (CI). I usually center my answers on a suite of Pantheon tools meant to combine an external git host (like Github or Bitbucket) with a Composer-based repo structure, and a CI platform (like CircleCI) push a build artifact to Pantheon. Any number of tests can then run after the push.

Today, I'm very happy to announce the first release of Pantheon Localdev. The current version is 0.4.2, so it is still in an early-access state, but it has been through extensive internal testing, as well as being put through its paces by members of our Heroes Community. I'm now happy to make it more widely available for production use.

Personalized content is the greatest consumer demand, but most brands have trouble meeting it. According to the "2018 Adobe Consumer Content Survey," 67% of consumers think it’s important for brands to automatically tailor content to them, and 42% get annoyed when content isn't relevant to their current situation. 

Last summer set the stage for a watershed moment in our move toward full-fledged agile marketing.

Data is everywhere, and marketers are expected to turn it into results like never before. But that doesn’t mean that harnessing it and deducing groundbreaking insights is easy. Data from social pages and third-party sites like Amazon and Google tell an important story, but discerning the nature of that story from the disparate sources can be a pain.

Earlier this year, I wrote about submitting our marketing stack at MarTech West. I had recently joined Pantheon and, honestly, the stack was partially aspirational, partially historical. Over the past few months, we have been revising, rebuilding and iterating on what is working and moving away from what was not. Experimentation and the ability to quickly assess successes and failures are the drivers behind what we select.

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.

At this point, you probably know the importance of embracing an agile approach for your web and marketing teams. Here at Pantheon, we see that the best digital experiences result from teams that regularly collaborate, experiment, and iterate on their websites using data-driven decisions.  

WordPress 5.0 was the first WordPress release to incorporate the new React-powered Gutenberg UI framework. With Gutenberg as the standard for WordPress interface development, WordPress developers can now benefit from more from the awesome React and JavaScript ecosystems to improve the developer experience and user experience of creating and using our plugins, themes, and sites.