> It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.

That describes every platform, programming language, layer of the stack, etc. that I've ever worked with.

There's a whole possible scale of responses and of encouraged workflow though.

Wordpress and a lot of php community does actually like the "drop in some code and it usually works" approach. This encourages continuing on that path.

On the other side, the failure can be handled in many ways. "This module could not be loaded and will be ignored." is one. Ensuring some preparation / validation is needed before upload is another.

Let's not go to extremes like "you're expected to have a staging environment for your personal blog because the framework cannot possibly help you".

At the end. All of our tooling sucks. Although I have to say generally the apache error log guides me to the right place.

If your log only shows an exception without any kind of stack trace or location, I’m sorry but Wordpress is not the problem.

It's not the main problem, but it also could do better. A system encouraging drop in additions could have a way of validating them and blocking plugins which fail.

I agree completely and think that’s a great idea!