The Slippery Slope

In two earlier blog formatted articles, I had explored ideas around using WordPress in a professional manner:

MEAN Stack and WordPress Marriage
http://mean-wordpress.blogspot.com/
This series of posts starts with the problem: I, as others that I know, have been struggling to figure out a good solution for handling user-managed content embedded in a MEAN (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js) stack application.
It ends with the conclusion that WordPress is an excellent choice for a CMS component. The caveat, however, it steers one against using WordPress as a general development platform. 

Barebones WordPress
http://barebones-wp.blogspot.com/
This series of posts explores the basics of creating WordPress themes for one's use; as opposed to creating one for redistribution.  The distinction is important as we will only focus on developing it for a particular use and thus greatly simplify the effort.
This effort also is focused on giving one maximal control over the site (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) with minimal use of programming (WordPress and PHP).

In this series of posts, we will explore the slippery slope of using WordPress and the temptation to overly depend on prebuilt components (themes and plugins) and then begin using it as a general development platform. We will contrast this approach with a more lean strategy that I have been advocating.

This experience is born out of a project where speed was of the essence and the taking a more traditional theme and plugin heavy approach was our team's joint solution (principally because of the familiarity of this approach given the timeline).