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> Whenever we hit a tiny corner case These are the nightmare of WordPress sites. Someone builds a house of cards out of a pile of plugins, and then I'm asked "

> Whenever we hit a tiny corner case These are the nightmare of WordPress sites. Someone builds a house of cards out of a pile of plugins, and then I'm asked "Why might it cost $$$ to upgrade my WordPress plugins?!?". Well sire, because plugins can throw in breaking changes, and an upgrade may take 2 minutes an work perfectly, or it might introduce a corner case that breaks something. And you don't have any automated tests to detect this breakage, so someone has to check by hand. Or forget a corner-case, it may completely break part of your site because a (commercial) plugin developer decided to rewrite and get rid of a feature you depended on [true story]. I try not to touch anything beyond a WordPress landing/marketing site, but every so often one comes bundled with another project or I give in to a sob story...

CM30 3y ago
This is arguably what's so dangerous about a plugin ecosystem in general. On the one hand, you can quickly implement a bunch of useful new functionality at the drop of a hat, and that's obviously incredibly useful for non technical folks. But at the same time, you then often end up dependency hell, and realise that any changes going forward will break something or another that your site depends on, leading to many, many sleepless nights. God help you if you're one of those folks who installed hundreds of plugins, because an upgrade often meant 'revert everything to default, then hope at least some of your plugins had equivalents for the next version'. It's why I'd recommend anyone who can do so to only use their own code for a WordPress (or other CMS based) site, and keep the third party stuff to popular plugins you know will get regular updates.