Performance issues with large grid

Hi!
First off — absolutely love Page Builder, I’ve integrated it into a massive tool for journalists here at The Times. I’ve been looking for something comparable for quite some time and Page Builder’s approach is the best so far.

Second — one thing I like less is how unperformant it is when there is a large number of rows. With how I’m using it, pages often have upwards of 20-30 rows, each with 1-4 regions in each. Given the way Page Builder constructs pages, sometimes the browser freezes for a solid 40 seconds after loading or update a post while Page Builder rebuilds the grid and widgets. While this is a small tradeoff given the power PB provides, I can totally see folks getting frustrated with that.

A possible (long-term) solution: instead of building a custom grid every time, just use Twitter Bootstrap’s grid. The “our grid is smaller than your grid” point on the website is somewhat irrelevant given most people will have a CDN copy of the Bootstrap grid cached somewhere. It’s less sophisticated but more straightforward (“x out of 12 columns” instead of “fractions of the total horizontal page width”), and it might save time on initial load (Though I haven’t run any tests on which part of page load is the slow part, whether it’s building the grid or the DOM manipulation that results).

Lastly and unrelated — dear god, it blows my mind every time I come here how awful WordPress’s groupware tools are. I have no idea if this issue has been addressed elsewhere, because the search is just a badly-implemented Google Site Search. It also makes it difficult to contribute patches or fixes using standard open source practises. Would you ever consider moving this project to GitHub? I have a tonne of stuff I’d consider contributing if given the opportunity.

Cheers,
-Æ.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/siteorigin-panels/