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.

I've given the security, or lack of, WP a lot of thought recently. In WP malicious plugin has access to the database, enfironment variables, rendering text on screen (think XSS). Luckily, a thoughtfully designed plugin system can mitigate all of those issues.

I've been working on a headless CMS in my spare time that is eirily similar to EmDash in a few ways. It's in very early development, but I will share regardless. It's called HotsauceCMS - https://github.com/hotsauce-team/hotsauce

- I went with optional NodeJS or Deno Worker plugins, this means that first-party plugins can benefit from the speed of in-process, and other plugins can be run in Workers. For fine grained permission control, you can use Deno Workers.

- I went with absolute minimal dependencies, I am so fed up with Dependabot alerts and npm supply chain hacks. My CMS has only 4 dependencies, 0 transistive dependencies.

- It's Drizzle schema first, and headless. So you have full controll of the database structure, use cms hints in your schema for features like file upload.

- It's database-agnostic, so it works with any Drizzle-supported database (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite)

- Being headless, you can use any frontend, my preference is JSX w/o react, but anything goes.

Feedback is absolutely welcomed on HotsauceCMS, did I miss a trick, am I on the right track?

Anyway, congratulations on EmDash. I'll be following closely, excited to see how the next few months unfold.

Yeah the security aspect is important, but how many of those Wordpress engineers are going to jump ship to this because of security when they've been fine with the risk so far? My money is not a lot. If someone is a WordPress dev in 2026, they're probably not the type of dev that likes to upskill and learn new tech. Similarly, if you're looking to target the average joe looking to build a fresh website, would that consumer really choose this over Wix or Squarespace? It doesn't look easier to use so I wouldn't count on it. So where is the network effect going to come from to make this the new WordPress?

I could see Vinext being successful if they keep at it— I think there are a sizeable amount of people who would like to move away from Vercel (and who will probably migrate to Tanstack when the ecosystem is more stable). But I'm not sure people on WordPress really want to leave. If they really want to make this successful I think they need a better angle which in my opinion would be making it easier, quicker, cheaper and more flexible than Squarespace/Wix/Shopify etc

Fascinating. Cloudflare is envisioning a future where agents are given debit cards by their owners, so they can autonomously send microtransactions to website owners to scrape content or possibly purchase goods on the owner's behalf. I don't know how I feel about that but there's no doubt it's a fascinating concept.

Brb, setting up a honeypot that always responds with HTTP 402 Payment Required demanding 10cents per visit... That's the next "selling 1 million pixels on my website for $1 each", I guess

There's no reason to use an interpreted, bloated, weird language anymore. The only reason interpreted languages were a thing was so you could edit a file and re-run it immediately without a compile step. Compiling is now cheap, and you don't have to build expertise in a new language anymore. Ask AI to write your app in Go, it'll happily comply. Run it and it's faster with less memory use and disk space. The code is simpler and smaller making reviewing easier. Distribution is as easy as "copy the file".

I'll grant you, interpreted languages skip the "portability" compiling/distributing step, and let you avoid the stupid MacOS code signing. But Go is stupid easy to cross-compile, and (afaik?) the user can un-quarantine a self-signed app pretty easily.

But the reason I'm still on WordPress isn't loyalty. It's that my clients can maintain their own sites without me. A small business owner updates their own pages, adds blog posts, changes a phone number. No developer needed. That's not a feature of WordPress. That IS the product.

EmDash solves a developer problem (sandboxed plugins, TypeScript, Workers) by building a developer product. Nothing wrong with that. But calling it a WordPress successor misses why WordPress won in the first place. It wasn't the code quality. It was the guy who runs a bakery being able to edit his own website on a Sunday morning.

E: Oh, I think it's an April fools joke, I'm embarrassed.

E2: Apparently not a joke.

WP treats plugins as content, literally in the same top level `wp-content` directory as uploaded images. This makes CI/CD among other things, a nightmare. But EmDash plugins are just TS modules, which has got to make things easier even if plugin configuration does end up in the db somewhere.

> A full-stack TypeScript CMS built on Astro and Cloudflare. EmDash takes the ideas that made WordPress dominant -- extensibility, admin UX, a plugin ecosystem -- and rebuilds them on serverless, type-safe foundations.

Someone should introduce the authors to the lovely em dash character. It's perfect for such sentences!

Ha ha, that's really funny timing given the recent launch of Cleanroom As A Service, promising that you can licensewash other peoples' code quickly and easily: https://malus.sh/

I'm not saying they did that, but it's ironic timing.

Just not accurate. WordPress doesn't prevent this.. It's up to hosting providers to work on their infra so it can run in a serverless fashion.

For example: https://www.agiler.io

That's serverless wordpress that scales to zero.. no changes to WordPress, plugins or anything else.. just platform infra.

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.

A "good" standard, free CMS with theming and plugin support without the issues of Wordpress is _welcome_. (And the issues are many: Licensing, trust, drama, security, and cost).

I'm guessing that a lot of cynicism here is coming from this crowd not being the target market of Wordpress in the first place? What were you recommending to non-technical friends and family who wanted a good, open source, affordable CMS to back their website? Wordpress has all the right _ideas_, but the wrong implementation.

With WP you can find a plethora of cheap PHP hostings that offer WP preinstalled. If you need to tweak a theme - just download a .php file via FTP, tweak it and upload back.

No server management or restart is required.

One big potential benefit that EmDash has - every WP deployment is basically a honeypot.

Most WordPress sites could just be static, but WordPress has a nice editor interface, so they're not - unless you use a SSG plugin. Building that into the core workflow (which I believe Astro supports) and giving users a nice hosted editor that produces a static site would be welcome innovation.

I struggle to understand why anyone would want to generate code in TypeScript - unless what you're building truly can't be done in Go, Rust, or Kotlin; anything but JS.

I’m not sure how much of an improvement it really is to rewrite something from PHP to TypeScript while claiming security benefits.

This is no successor, it's not even in the same universe. - vendor lock-in, losing gpl, losing access to plugins source code, loosing ownership.

Anything built on PHP will be widely used, like Laravel

> no WordPress code was used to create EmDash

Hm. Do you think those agents were trained on WP code?

base platform used - typescript - means for the average Joe out there - deploying is difficult - compared to php.

if they really wanted to be revolutionary - they would've made a single PHP script either on FrankenPHP backed by sqlite - single file deploy - with yeah a permission model Ala denojs for the security aspects.

end of day this is vibeslop.

It takes me to the expected Cloudflare dashboard page, with title “Clone a repository” and with the GitHub repository URL field filled with https://github.com/emdash-cms/templates/tree/main/blog-cloud... but when I click Continue, the Continue button changes to “…” and animates indicating it’s thinking, but then nothing happens. No error messages shown, nothing. The Continue button switches back to having the Continue text and being clickable.

I tried deleting a couple of old applications I had in the Workers & Pages page of the Cloudflare dashboard thinking that maybe I had exhausted the number of such applications I can have on a free Cloudflare account. The number of applications I have is now down to 7, after deleting a couple of old ones. Still, attempting to deploy EmDash to my Cloudflare account fails in the same way as before without any error messages shown.

I was using Safari on iOS 18.7.1. I will try on a desktop browser, in case the problem is only happening in Safari on iOS.

Is this April fools? With real products launching on this date you can't really be too sure.

Oh, neat. Which model wasn't trained on WordPress?

You want anything beyond ghost? Find a way to port the vast market of 100,000+ cheap and free themes and components that are available to enable tech-illiterate, low-budget users to basically build an entire business platform on a $5/mo shared hosting plan.

A vibe coded CMS that's 3 months in the making is not capable of taking that place in the market, no matter how much VC funding you put behind it.

In contrast, typical web frameworks (even static sites) require a code change, build, deploy, etc to update many aspects of a site.

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.

   The cost of building software has drastically decreased.

> Most abstractions in software exist because humans need help...It's not clear yet which abstractions are truly foundational and which ones were just crutches for human cognition... We took an API contract, a build tool, and an AI model, and the AI wrote everything in between.

That said, WordPress is a weird paradigm to be replicating in 2026. WP won on extensibility, but the actual legacy of that ecosystem is bloat, security disasters and dogshit performance.

What I think makes more sense is this kind of edge backend paired with a proper modern authoring experience with visual control like Framer/Webflow with Notion-style database primitives underneath.

And given how fast AI is getting at generating bespoke business logic, building another monolithic plugin ecosystem feels like solving the wrong problem.

Plugins were a workaround for the fact that most people couldn't write code. That's increasingly not true.

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

A while ago I ran claude code in a custom loop (calling it autoclaude; this was last summer) to create a CMS with Gutenberg’s editor but a lean Python backend (github.com/hessammehr/nuCMS). This was in the Sonnet 3.7 days and even that model got quite far.

"Plugin security is the root of this problem. Marketplace businesses provide trust when parties otherwise cannot easily trust each other. In the case of the WordPress marketplace, the plugin security risk is so large and probable that many of your customers can only reasonably trust your plugin via the marketplace. But in order to be part of the marketplace your code must be licensed in a way that forces you to give it away for free everywhere other than that marketplace. You are locked in."

There was much drama with wordpress some time ago and the plugin marketplace.

    capabilities: ["read:content", "email:send"],

Additionally, as others have already mentioned, the best security would be no dynamic code at all, just static pages generated by Jekyll. This should have been a Jekyll frontend, IMO.

>And because WordPress plugins run in the same execution context as WordPress itself and are so deeply intertwined with WordPress code, some argue they must carry forward WordPress’ GPL license.

That is a feature, not a bug. I already have to debug broken or poorly-documented WordPress plugins as-is, my job would be 100x harder if those plugins were proprietary and forbade inspection of the code.

Furthermore, while the GPL forbids locking down plugins to charge a licensing premium, it does not forbid charging money in general. While in theory you can legally pirate paid WordPress plugins (it's called "nulling"), in practice few do this because it's an obvious and blatant security risk[1]. Paid plugin authors are selling support and software assurance that has real value.

Also, I must take umbrage with the legal hedging. "Some argue"? Like, the GPL is strategically ambiguous with regards to the definition of a "Program"[2], but it'd be very hard to write a useful WordPress plugin that does not become part of the same Program.

[0] This is predominantly a fault of JavaScript, which has no threading story and is designed to fit in a foreign event loop. In Rust, async code can spawn and await real threads to hold blocking code, and sequential code can host its own event loop to run async in.

[1] Especially if you were to, say, name your nulled version "Secure Custom Fields". Nobody would EVER do that, right?

[2] No, proprietary Linux modules don't count. Linux has a userspace syscall exception that defangs the GPL, so it's perfectly possible to write kernel-mode code that only touches syscall equivalents.

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".

They fix many of the hosting concerns , but it’s way too complex, and lacks wordpresses biggest selling points.

People will be vibecoding Wordpress templates and sites for another 15 years

This would avoid plugin scanning and direct plugin code execution.

For the CMS I'm developing, Vvveb CMS, no plugin code is exposed, everything passes through the only exposed php file `public/index.php`

Can a successor for Wordpres shave some amount or type of import, conversion, or backwards compatibility?

Can there. ba way to tie in wordpress plugins or their functionality through a secure interface/translation layer?

Adoption for new projects is one thing, migration is another.

There's some cms that pretty much build in some core amount of main plugins right into the core cms.

So, long story short I ended up removing write permission to all the folders, thus disabling upload, and later they went to another server. They host it fine there, I still maintain redirection from the main domain to their host. However I failed, but really this is sad the WP is so vulnerable just by the plugins installation.

Since then I am looking for WP replacement that would not mix up the code and the images from the upload directory (presumably in rust or golang), but this would need to be opensource anyways.

Re-implementing WordPress (their words, not mine) as MIT licensed, while legally questionable, breaks that virtuous cycle and removes the community's moat. They've taken WordPress's roles and menus and borrowed its Gutenberg code (which is GPL), and launched it as an MIT licensed product, which breaks that virtuous cycle. It means e.g. a hosting company can take the product closed source if they want to, and never have to contribute any of what they build on top of the community's work, back to the community.

https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/tree/main/packages/core... says "The core EmDash CMS package - an Astro-native, agent-portable reimplementation of WordPress."

Emdash uses WP's RBAC roles. Also uses their menus. Also depends on @wordpress/block-serialization-default-parser which I think might (??) be able to be used by an MIT project even though WordPress is GPL.

They used Claude Code it seems because the first commit has a CLAUDE.md file which became an AGENTS.md.

A system for using Federated and Independent Repositories in WordPress

The repo says "depends on Dynamic Workers ... Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts" but the article says "but you can run it on your own hardware".

This IS an April Fools joke, whether or not they intended it to be one.

Is the second coming of Wordpress what we really need?

Will EmDash work with shared hosting?

With Cloudflare behind it, hopefully plugin vendors will start paying attention.

I'd usually expect this to be used about something like Google Reader, not something you are actively competing with.

What does it mean, to be "compatible with functionality"?

At a first glance this statement promises a lot, but does it really mean anything technically?

https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse

The Cloudflare Workers approach (V8 isolates) is fundamentally better because it enforces boundaries at the runtime level rather than relying on developer goodwill. Curious to see how they handle the migration path for existing WP sites though — that's where projects like this usually die.

Most WordPress users use at least one plugin: it is the appeal of the product.

Its a CMS, designed from scratch, for a serverless world. It has a stricter, well defined API that plugins are forced to use instead of directly calling/overriding core functionality like in WP. But that benefit comes with a CMS that's built on top of, and seems to prefer, a ton of CF proprietary capabilities (D1 Databases, R2 for image/media storage, their workers for running things).

The web need less consolidation on CF, not more.

(To be clear, I'm no fan of WordPress either, and its security hassles are a real issue. But some sloppified MegaCorp vibecoded fever dream will never be a suitable replacement, of that I guarantee.)

If Cloudflare really have radically changed their software development philosophy lately, this would actually be an interesting project, being based on Astro and coming with some APIs for programmatic management.

Them being so happy about the „cost of software development“ and not going very deep into ecosystem, community or project management doesn’t convince me that this is going to be a worthwhile project, even if, unlike their previous vibe coding demos, this one actually works.

I have been on and off in the past 6 - 7 years trying to get DHH / 37Signals to release a CMS / simply blog system that compete with Wordpress.

May be Shopify should do it instead, and name it Pressify.

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management

What I don't love is how insecure it is. You're entirely dependent on plugins (if you're not a developer), and if WordPress updates and a plugin goes inactive, you're sitting on a vulnerability. It adds real stress for something that's just supposed to be a fun personal site.

I stopped building on it two years ago, even though I still like it more than Webflow and most alternatives I've tried. It's a bit sad.

Half the websites on wordpress moved to shopify, squarespace, etc. a very long time ago. The remaining half were blogs, personal pages, wikis, etc. that moved to community/social platforms created in the past decade(s). In a few cases out of all this someone finally learned how to write/host a webpage themselves (imagine that)! It's even easier with AI now.

I'm totally serious when I ask "why". Who actually uses a CMS or anything like that anymore? It's madness!

Having got back in to some WP in the last year, the big thing that struck me compared to other framework/environments is... no... build step, or even plugin/module install step. Files are just there in the document root, accessible by default - the logic files are invokable and the asset files are reachable. Most other php frameworks will install a plugin/module outside the document root then have some sort of publish/install step that will copy assets to be publicly accessible as needed. No plugin logic files would be invokable directly from a URL. That one change would make a big difference, imo, but seeing so much of the last 15-20 years of WP involves helper functions to assumed paths, and default assumptions about assets and logic living in the same paths... I'm not sure the ecosystem could adapt or support an alternative approach at this stage. Might be wrong. It's taken me a while to put my finger on why the current situation encourages less-secure-by-default systems, and this is probably the biggest thing I've landed on. There are other issues, but these issues all help contribute to WP popularity in the first place...

(looks for cameras) Wait a minute, am I being Punk'D? Oh my god! Ashton, you really got me! Ha Ha! Ashton!