WordPress takes a lot of heat. Some of that heat has been thrown by me. It can be frustrating to run a WordPress-powered site, to develop products for it, to ship code within it, and to deal with all of the personalities in its community. But there is no denying that it is that very community, the openness of its core, the pluggable nature of its design, and the distributed ecosystem around it is what makes it powerful.
WordPress is capable for the same reasons it can break from time-to-time.
But! There are ways to limit its breaking! And NerdPress excels at it.
Tina Collier, one of my colleagues at NerdPress, wrote about why WordPress sites can break and acknowledges that the stack of dependencies (PHP, WordPress, plugins, themes, custom code) can get out of alignment:
No one in this scenario is being malicious or careless — developers really would prefer their products not cause issues! — but this is how an open ecosystem with thousands of contributors behaves, and it’s why an update on your site can behave differently than it did for someone else.
One of the greatest challenges in shipping Hubbub, a NerdPress product, is the myriad of environments it can find itself running within across such a wide variety of dependencies. But we wouldn’t have it any other way.