EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

vessenes

Here to say -- great name. It's not just a reference to our modern times, it's a sign of brilliance. (I wrote this myself with no clanker support)

bo0tzz

I've been wanting a CMS on top of Cloudflare workers for a while, so I hope this pays off!

kocialnews

The power of WordPress is not the ease of use, but PHP. Anything built on PHP will be widely used, like Laravel

nullable_bool

Its kind of annoying that CF would use an LLM to build something and try to pass it off as something built from "the ground up". Its just copying the library that was already build and passing it off as their own.

philipwhiuk

The problem is that it doesn't solve the network-effect problem. People aren't on WordPress because of WordPress. They're on WordPress because of WooCommerce, a million themes, BuddyPress, integrations for every stupid internal business API on the planet (many of which are terrible and were written by an idiot with a crayon). The APIs will have no testing because they are bad. In many cases the WordPress implementation of the API written in the codeblock, ran on page-load to the pain of the person responsible for SEO, is the API contract. And yes those plugins are also terrible, but they solve business problems, even if they are tech problems. You can't just launch a better wp-core and expect it to replace any of that. EmDash needs to actually run the existing insecure WP plugins to takeover.

embedding-shape

> Our name for this new CMS is EmDash. We think of it as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It’s written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites. To me this sounds of the polar opposite of the direction CMS's need to go, instead simplify and go back to the "websites" roots where a website are static files wherever, it's fast, easy to cache and just so much easier to deal with than server-side rendered websites. But of course, then they wouldn't be able to sell their own "workers" product, so suddenly I think I might understand why they built it the way they built it, at the very least to dogfood their own stuff. I'm not sure it actually solves the "fundamental security problem" in actuality though, but I guess that remains to be seen.

halapro

Yes definitely compare it multiple times to WordPress and nobody will think of calling their lawyers. Is this April fools? With real products launching on this date you can't really be too sure.

squidbeak

Impressive and created by agents. Another example for skeptics wondering where the AI apps are.

jmkni

It's kind of ironic that the name of this product is also the most obvious marker of LLM generated content

megnu

The UI doesn't seem geared to power users. E.g. Why is the featured image taking up so much space above the content editing area when it's sized appropriately for the sidebar? Imagine you need to update the text of several posts... Well, now you gotta scroll down half the page to the content area of each one. And all that padding gets you quite the narrow content area. Not to mention it looks like a very basic TinyMCE. Seems like more of a POC than an actual "spiritual successor".

mrcwinn

It’s written in typescript, not PHP. How does this improve security if no one uses it because they’ve invested so much in the WP plugin ecosystem?

pxtail

Good one, at last, April fools joke with some effort.

8organicbits

I don't think it's the code that makes WordPress valuable. I've been learning WordPress recently and haven't been too impressed with the internals. WordPress is valuable because of the ecosystem and support. I have no doubt that WordPress will still be a thing in ten years. What's the support plan for EmDash? I see commits are mostly from a single developer. E: Oh, I think it's an April fools joke, I'm embarrassed. E2: Apparently not a joke.

yeah879846

"Failed to initialize playground"

ramesh31

I really hope Cloudflare is ready and willing to stand by this thing for the next 20 years, and drive it as a first class product with a huge open source team. Because short of that you can just add this to the mile-long list of "successors to WordPress" we've been through over the decades. Maybe they're in it for the long haul. We'll see. But it takes time, and mountains of integrations and acceptance into the wider web authoring ecosystem for anything like this to gain real adoption.

ChrisArchitect

Held up getting into the details of this ambitious project because of the name! Ridiculous choice considering the associations with AI, slop, and even the general crowded namespace surrounding that. C'mon. (looks for cameras) Wait a minute, am I being Punk'D? Oh my god! Ashton, you really got me! Ha Ha! Ashton!

woodylondon

Reading the comments below, have we all fallen for a 1st April Fools' joke? Actually, rebuilding WordPress without the ecosystem is kind of the point. For example, would Divi or the major page builders rebuild their entire products to support this? I doubt it

AIorNot

Damm Anthropic had a chance to say april fools too for the claude code leak!!

bbx

I'm all for creating new frameworks that are faster and more secure. But I don't see how this one relates to Wordpress (not in PHP, serverless, not "plug and play", dependent on Astro, "AI Native"…). It looks like a good open source project, but just call it a new CMS. I think calling it a "spiritual successor to WordPress" is just to gain some marketing points.

tamimio

Will be there a way to export all the posts to markdown so you never get locked in?