WordPress was a great tool to use in publsihing the blog till recently. In the last few months, the visual editor that I use to create/update pages and he blog posts has been updated and that update has resulted in a miserable experience for me and looking at the posts on the web it seems to be a universal problem.

When I am working with posts containing little content there is no problem, but once the content gets beyond some threshold and also depending on the content in the page (links to audio files for example), the editor becomes quite unusable. Pasting links result in some random scrolling and on occassions the links are included as text etc which are tolerable. But on a page woth a lot of content, addition of content is like watching paint dry. The page is unresponsive for up to 20-30 seconds after a word or a few words are entered (frequency is quite random and sometimes for every character that I enter) and on occassion the information I have typed is lost in the cyberspace. The update to the MSG page was a cery frustrating experience that took about 3 hours to update. Finall i got all the content written out in Notepad and pasted to the page – even that resulted in errors and it was that third attempt that finally worked 😦

Reading thru the forums and looking at the behavior of the page, it appears that some fancy feature that they seem to have added results in an ajax call to their server each time I type a letter or word which results in poor performance (CPU utilization shoots up during this time);  and the problem becomes progressively worse with larger content and that was the problem I had to content with. I am shocked that the wordpress folks are letting this be the behavior of the editor. In the forums I did read that the problem is linked to the use of a plugin called yoast but I don’t have this on my site and leaves me wondering what these guys are really up to. I am posting this a problem on their forum and then wait and see what they have to say.