“WP sometimes doesn’t like it”… well, it’s hard for me to politically correct when vast sections of the core code appear to have been written by the participants at an 8th grade slumber party. Yes, not including that field in a post-type might crash the site, other plugins might fail to execute, other bad things may happen and you might never know because the 8th graders didn’t find it necessary to include a logging queue in their application. So yeah, ouch, rant, etc.
The specific problem I’ve encountered here is that the loading of the richtext editor triggers other events, and then other critical tasks (and sometimes other plugins) are hooked to those events, so if you don’t include that field, you may inadvertently trainwreck the edit page because you broke the daisy-chain. It’s a huge weakness in any event-driven app, especially one that is basically without documentation. I think I’ve patched all the leaks in the dam with regard to this particular issue, but with each new version of WP including an increasing number of undocumented events and filters, it’s hard to stay on top of. Omitting the post_title field is even more problematic.
In a word, certain customizations were apparently never considered by the core team, so attempting to make hard-coded spaghetti into a modular design pattern after the fact is hell for 3rd party developers. It is *probably* ok to omit that field, but I really try to educate users so they know what they’re in for when they opt for WP — it’s a bit like a classic car. It might turn heads, appear stylish, etc, but it might not survive a serious road trip. I’m yabbering on longer than I should, but hopefully that makes sense to you.
