Sometimes you don’t break production by writing bad code. Sometimes you break your local environment by simply… updating something. 😅
I was working on a Carbon Fields setup and noticed that iamntz/carbon-fields-urlpicker had suddenly stopped working on one of my sites running WordPress 7.1.
The interesting part? It worked perfectly on my Bedrock setup.
I hadn’t changed anything in the actual implementation. A random update on the local environment was enough to expose the issue.
Thankfully, I caught it while testing locally before pushing anything out. And honestly, this is exactly why I’m a big believer in not immediately updating everything just because a new version is available.
Let other people find the bugs first. 😂
Especially with WordPress, plugins, PHP, Composer packages, themes, etc., an update that looks completely harmless can suddenly break something you’ve been relying on for months.
My rule is pretty simple:
Test locally → wait a bit → check for issues → then update production.
And always test your sites locally before making updates to client sites. Even if it’s a tiny dependency update that should be harmless.
This time, the update found me before I found the update.
And luckily, it happened on my local machine. 😎
Your local environment is supposed to catch these things. Let it do its job.