Chris WiegmanI’m writing this post, or trying to, from Firefox on my Framework laptop with a 12th gen i7 processor and 32GB of RAM. It rums Fedora and, for the most part, it works really well.
The exception to this is WordPress. Even on this site with only a few plugins WordPress can lock up the entire computer for about 10-20 seconds at a time. When it happens even the mouse doesn’t respond and I’ll simply look away until it starts working again. It’s incredibly frustrating. I’ve seen this on my M1 iPad Pro as well when I try to write on WordPress. It gets worse when I get beyond about 1,000 words at which point either machine will freeze up about once per paragraph. All of this is after a low-end Chromebook I gave away when WordPress 5.0 first came out as it couldn’t handle the Block Editor at all.
I’m starting this paragraph over because it locked up once again.
I don’t know what my next move is but this isn’t going to work for me. All I use WordPress for and all I want it for is a solid writing experience and today it is not that. I shouldn’t need to throw such heavy hardware at writing, yet here I am and it still doesn’t work well. What’s more depressing is that these lockups really do happen only with WordPress.
I have a lot invested in the WordPress platform and it is still the only platform I know that can let me write (sort of) while also supporting custom structured content like my speaking page and, soon, my book and reading list. That said, I’m getting so very tired of trying to manage content in a platform that no longer seems like it really cares about managing content.
Here’s to hoping content and performance will once again become a focus of the core WordPress team.