[karaterobot]

Counterpoint: I've had a Wordpress blog for almost 20 years, I've never paid anyone a dime. I don't know PHP, and I only use two plugins, both of them free. With a little bit of Googling you can just hack together whatever you need, because there is a lot of documentation for Wordpress. The author is a web dev, so I'm surprised their first thought was that they needed a plugin to load a font.

[Cthulhu_]

It's because customizing a Wordpress theme is a daunting task at first, especially if you try and use the builtin editor instead of taking a theme and stripping it down. WP's page layout and templating is... Different. Which is why it's turned into its own specialism / industry.

[lolinder]

Again, though, we're talking about a web dev who had previously been managing their own hand-rolled blogging solution.

Something like sticky menus should be trivial for any web dev: find the menu you want to make sticky in the web inspector. Modify the styles inline until you make it work. Grep the theme for the selector that you modified. Copy your modifications.

[gifmenger]

Yet using it as a headless CMS allows any dev to just circumvent it's theming dialect altogether.

I think that really illustrates Wordpress' versatility.

[fragmede]

It's because you don't want to leave a pile of shit for the next person to clean up. If you're maintaining code, and a function seems to be returning the wrong value for the ticket/bug you're investigating, do you comment out the whole function and just return $right_answer, or do you investigate what's going on so that the function is returning the wrong answer for a given set of args.

By that same extension, a custom hacked up theme is the "return 4; /*" of site maintenance.

By using a plugin, the person that follows you doesn't have to be a webdev who could float a css div blindfolded.

[Gazoo101]

Do you manage the Wordpress blog installation yourself?

As part 2 will detail, the whole purpose of switching to Wordpress was to reduce the work load of building/maintaining the site. I fully agree, Wordpress is swimming in tutorials, docs, and sometimes guides disguised as advertisements for a paid theme.

Re. changing fonts - My actual first thought was 'Surely I just need to find the settings in WP that let's me change the theme's font', and my experience was that Wordpress did not 'natively' support this.

[PriceDev]

Originally Wordpress 6.4 was supposed to introduce a native way to change fonts through the Font Library addition, but it’s been postponed until 6.5.

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59166

[Gazoo101]

Ah, very interesting!