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.
Cloudflare doesn't do April fools jokes. In fact, 1.1.1.1 was released on April 1st back in 2018 and now it's one of the most used DNS service in the world.
I think you need to account for the base rate. There's a lot of WordPress plugin vulnerability disclosures because there's a lot of WordPress plugins and there are enough deployments of the plugins to make searching for those vulnerabilities is worthwhile.
That site warns that WordPress plugins can be abandoned, but that's clearly not a WordPress specific issue. Sure some site could use SSG, but that's a different design.
I certainly don't want to claim WordPress security is good, but I'm not sure that site is measuring anything meaningful.
wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
yes you want a global db handle sure ya lets delete all tables woohoo
> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.
There's another vertical which is organizations that have armies of writers churning out content. Any kind of publisher or advertiser, basically. There is no better CMS for this. Large organizations like NYT, etc chose to write their own.
> While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license.
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.
A WordPress spiritual successor backed by Cloudflare sounds great in theory, but the headline feature, plugin isolation via Dynamic Workers, only works on Cloudflare's runtime. On any other host it's just a TypeScript CMS without the security model that justifies its existence. Open source but architecturally locked in.
> 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.
I think this is true, however, when it comes to non-coding clients I've worked with they really do like the ability to make minor edits to a site with a UI rather than having to continually ping a developer.
The problem with WordPress (and it looks like this solution largely just replicated the problem) is that it's way too cumbersome and bloated.
It really is unlike any modern UI for really any SaaS or software in general.
It's filled with meaningless admin notices, the sidebar is 5 miles long and about 98% of what the user sees is meaningless to them.
Creating a very lightweight, minimal UI for the client to edit exactly what they need or like you said, just static files really is the best solution in most cases. The "page builders" always just turn into a nightmare the clients end up handing over for a dev to "fix" anyways.
Not sure why so many people feel the need to continue on the decades of bloat and cruft WordPress has accumulated, even if it's "modernized."
But "back to CMS roots" is absolutely not what the WordPress ecosystem is about. It's about the absolute galaxy of plugins that provide you with an entire digital experience "in a box". You can just install whatever plugins for ecommerce, CRM, forms management, payments, event calendars. They will all plugin to both the template system and the MySQL database. There are a lot of well-known and reputable plugins with huge installed bases (woocommerce, gravity forms, yoast seo) but there's a ton of shady ones that can infect your install. Cloudflare is directly addressing the shortcomings of the existing plugin architecture indicating they intend for EmDash to fill a similar niche as an All-in-One digital experience and not just a simple CMS.
Reminds me of Vercel and NextJS, where a popular framework design is constrained by, or optimally runs, on their infra, but then comes with pains or unusualness if self-hosted (eg. middleware). Vendor lock-in plays are a big red flag
The question is then they'd be building some brand new thing not compatible with wordpress. Supposedly the proposition is to steal people away from wordpress. Not just get people building something from scratch looking for a new framework. I'm guessing the recent lawsuits also provide some momentum.
It's not compatible with WordPress, though. It slurps a WordPress export, which is quite literally static data. They expect you to code up anything dynamic using their agent skill.
> x402 is an open, neutral standard for Internet-native payments. It lets anyone on the Internet easily charge, and any client pay on-demand, on a pay-per-use basis. A client, such as an agent, sends a HTTP request and receives a HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. In response, the client pays for access on-demand, and the server can let the client through to the requested content.
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
If you can find a way to trick agents into always accepting your payment required then you could set up a tarpit generating trash content or an infinite string of redirects or "read this other page for more info", charging extra for each one.
Tell that to the guy who got upset with WP Engine. EmDash is clearly "inspired" by WordPress including in its UI, so there's definitely something to it.
The problem with WP Engine was that the name is confusing to users who aren't familiar with it. Presumably the WordPress Engine is the core of Wordpress? Or it's the thing powering Wordpress? It's easy to see ways in which an end user could be confused which was which.
Conversely, this product is called something else, and while their blog post references Wordpress repeatedly it's in a way as to make it very clear that this is not that.
The phrase "spiritual successor to WordPress" is not likely to be judged a trademark violation, though. It doesn't create confusion in the marketplace as to whether Emdash is WordPress.
That used to be a major selling point because hosts enabled PHP for a directory devs would FTP things into, but those days are thankfully long gone. I don't think it's any more difficult to host a JS, TS, or anything else, app than it is to host a PHP app today. In fact, PHP is probably more difficult than something like Netlify.
All PHP is going to be replaced with single binary Rust apps.
Talented teams will build the atoms for most apps - blogs, CMSes, ticket systems, forums - and it'll be easy for end users to configure.
Rust is easy to code gen and deploy now. No barrier to understanding lifetimes. It's the language everyone should be using Claude Code to emit.
Everyone is now a Rust engineer with 10 years of experience. (I'm not joking, just in case that needs clarification.)
If you haven't tried writing a simple web service in Axum or Actix plus SQLx, you need to give it a try. You'll be amazed at how simple it is, and you'll be even more amazed at how performant and easy it is to work with.
You do not need to know Rust or have any prior Rust experience. You'll pick it up along the way. It's easy and you'll learn it fast.
Rust is a low-defect rate language to serialize to. The syntax begs you to handle errors, nulls, exceptional conditions within the language itself. This is naturally a good fit for most business problems. It doesn't hurt that the language is fast as hell and super portable either.
If the job is now encoding business logic - this is the optimal serialization that I'm aware of. I write Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, PHP, Swift - I can't think of any better language for greenfield projects that don't have existing language/library requirements.
I'm not sure you appreciate why PHP was successful. You might be completely right about all this, but the LAMP-stack "just upload this file to shared hosting" workflow is what made apps like WordPress win out, and the barrier remains significantly higher to do the equivalent with Rust.
"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.
It's a shame they don't seem to try to address the divide between CMS's and static sites.
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.
EmDash with some aggressive caching and SWR is effectively this, and we're getting closer to that every day. When the cost of maintaining the data part of the CMS is effectively free, you're basically working with a static site anyway.
I haven’t used Wordpress for a few years. But with WP Super Cache (1) we also always did pretty much that: On saving a post/page the static HTML would be written to a cache directory and be the default content served to visitors.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
You seem to have missed the point. This is intended to be more secure in a new world where exploits will be cheap to discover. The factors you mention won't keep people onboard if systems are compromised every day in too many ways for fragmented security teams to keep on top of.
I think this is too soon to call. No one questions whether AI can build things. We question whether they can build stable things that work as expected and stay online in the long run.
I too have seen a lot of comments asking where the products are. If you're now moving the goal posts to "stay online in the long run" you're gonna have to wait until there's been a long run to stay online in. Agents aren't that old yet.
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!
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.
I can assure you this is not an April Fools. Cloudflare does not do that. This is a real project.
Cloudflare doesn't do April fools jokes. In fact, 1.1.1.1 was released on April 1st back in 2018 and now it's one of the most used DNS service in the world.
It's a legit April Fools'.
On the initial commit:
> Some content is hidden
> Large Commits have some content hidden by default. Use the searchbox below for content that may be hidden.
This for "a spiritual successor to WordPress".
There's always https://textpattern.com/ which is also as old as Wordpress (older?) and better coded. (See also thttps://textpattern.org/ ).
It stores plugins as strings in the database, then pulls those strings back and evals them as PHP on requests.
"Better coded" is very much a subjective assessment.
There might be pie on your face but they stole my line, https://github.com/HatmanStack/kill-wordpress
I think you need to account for the base rate. There's a lot of WordPress plugin vulnerability disclosures because there's a lot of WordPress plugins and there are enough deployments of the plugins to make searching for those vulnerabilities is worthwhile.
That site warns that WordPress plugins can be abandoned, but that's clearly not a WordPress specific issue. Sure some site could use SSG, but that's a different design.
I certainly don't want to claim WordPress security is good, but I'm not sure that site is measuring anything meaningful.
Hm, you might want to catch up on the Wordpress “open source” drama with WP.com vs .org, WP engine and Matt.
wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
yes you want a global db handle sure ya lets delete all tables woohoo
> wordpress is valuable because it allows very bad developers / marketing people to write very bad code and get away with it, driving extremely low cost solutions for clients who are cost concious.
You've sort of nailed it, but this isn't a bad thing. An alternative for these customers does not exist.
There's another vertical which is organizations that have armies of writers churning out content. Any kind of publisher or advertiser, basically. There is no better CMS for this. Large organizations like NYT, etc chose to write their own.
This is great, but if the plugin ecosystem isn't compatible will it take off?
Most WordPress users use at least one plugin: it is the appeal of the product.
> While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license.
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.
A WordPress spiritual successor backed by Cloudflare sounds great in theory, but the headline feature, plugin isolation via Dynamic Workers, only works on Cloudflare's runtime. On any other host it's just a TypeScript CMS without the security model that justifies its existence. Open source but architecturally locked in.
> 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.
I think this is true, however, when it comes to non-coding clients I've worked with they really do like the ability to make minor edits to a site with a UI rather than having to continually ping a developer.
The problem with WordPress (and it looks like this solution largely just replicated the problem) is that it's way too cumbersome and bloated.
It really is unlike any modern UI for really any SaaS or software in general.
It's filled with meaningless admin notices, the sidebar is 5 miles long and about 98% of what the user sees is meaningless to them.
Creating a very lightweight, minimal UI for the client to edit exactly what they need or like you said, just static files really is the best solution in most cases. The "page builders" always just turn into a nightmare the clients end up handing over for a dev to "fix" anyways.
Not sure why so many people feel the need to continue on the decades of bloat and cruft WordPress has accumulated, even if it's "modernized."
But "back to CMS roots" is absolutely not what the WordPress ecosystem is about. It's about the absolute galaxy of plugins that provide you with an entire digital experience "in a box". You can just install whatever plugins for ecommerce, CRM, forms management, payments, event calendars. They will all plugin to both the template system and the MySQL database. There are a lot of well-known and reputable plugins with huge installed bases (woocommerce, gravity forms, yoast seo) but there's a ton of shady ones that can infect your install. Cloudflare is directly addressing the shortcomings of the existing plugin architecture indicating they intend for EmDash to fill a similar niche as an All-in-One digital experience and not just a simple CMS.
Sure, but if I want to host my static files on a website where they are easily cached... cloudflare also offers this product?
Reading this paragraph I was genuinely convinced it was an April 1st thing.
Reminds me of Vercel and NextJS, where a popular framework design is constrained by, or optimally runs, on their infra, but then comes with pains or unusualness if self-hosted (eg. middleware). Vendor lock-in plays are a big red flag
The question is then they'd be building some brand new thing not compatible with wordpress. Supposedly the proposition is to steal people away from wordpress. Not just get people building something from scratch looking for a new framework. I'm guessing the recent lawsuits also provide some momentum.
It's not compatible with WordPress, though. It slurps a WordPress export, which is quite literally static data. They expect you to code up anything dynamic using their agent skill.
Who wants to vibe code an open source Cloudflare?
> Solving scale-to-zero for WordPress hosting platforms > WordPress is not serverless
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.
> x402 is an open, neutral standard for Internet-native payments. It lets anyone on the Internet easily charge, and any client pay on-demand, on a pay-per-use basis. A client, such as an agent, sends a HTTP request and receives a HTTP 402 Payment Required status code. In response, the client pays for access on-demand, and the server can let the client through to the requested content.
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
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
If you can find a way to trick agents into always accepting your payment required then you could set up a tarpit generating trash content or an infinite string of redirects or "read this other page for more info", charging extra for each one.
It's like the exploit from Office Space is finally legal.
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.
Not an April fools joke. [0]
[0] https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
That makes it look more like an April fools joke. All the commits are from today.
Cloudflare specifically launches things on April 1st a lot of times. https://x.com/Cloudflare/status/1907055975057506793
They announced 1.1.1.1 on April 1st way back in 2018 too.
That's not unusual though, large companies releasing something open source very often squash the history at launch.
The best jokes are serious.
> Yes definitely compare it multiple times to WordPress and nobody will think of calling their lawyers.
It's not illegal to make product comparisons. That's just competition.
Tell that to the guy who got upset with WP Engine. EmDash is clearly "inspired" by WordPress including in its UI, so there's definitely something to it.
The problem with WP Engine was that the name is confusing to users who aren't familiar with it. Presumably the WordPress Engine is the core of Wordpress? Or it's the thing powering Wordpress? It's easy to see ways in which an end user could be confused which was which.
Conversely, this product is called something else, and while their blog post references Wordpress repeatedly it's in a way as to make it very clear that this is not that.
The phrase "spiritual successor to WordPress" is not likely to be judged a trademark violation, though. It doesn't create confusion in the marketplace as to whether Emdash is WordPress.
It's kind of ironic that the name of this product is also the most obvious marker of LLM generated content
That's the joke.
Oh I am slow lol
Is this an April fools?
"That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license."
I don't like where any of this is going
The power of WordPress is not the ease of use, but PHP.
Anything built on PHP will be widely used, like Laravel
That used to be a major selling point because hosts enabled PHP for a directory devs would FTP things into, but those days are thankfully long gone. I don't think it's any more difficult to host a JS, TS, or anything else, app than it is to host a PHP app today. In fact, PHP is probably more difficult than something like Netlify.
That’s also nice joke! You are all killing it today
Well, you’re quite fucking wrong there.
All PHP is going to be replaced with single binary Rust apps.
Talented teams will build the atoms for most apps - blogs, CMSes, ticket systems, forums - and it'll be easy for end users to configure.
Rust is easy to code gen and deploy now. No barrier to understanding lifetimes. It's the language everyone should be using Claude Code to emit.
Everyone is now a Rust engineer with 10 years of experience. (I'm not joking, just in case that needs clarification.)
If you haven't tried writing a simple web service in Axum or Actix plus SQLx, you need to give it a try. You'll be amazed at how simple it is, and you'll be even more amazed at how performant and easy it is to work with.
You do not need to know Rust or have any prior Rust experience. You'll pick it up along the way. It's easy and you'll learn it fast.
Rust is a low-defect rate language to serialize to. The syntax begs you to handle errors, nulls, exceptional conditions within the language itself. This is naturally a good fit for most business problems. It doesn't hurt that the language is fast as hell and super portable either.
If the job is now encoding business logic - this is the optimal serialization that I'm aware of. I write Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, PHP, Swift - I can't think of any better language for greenfield projects that don't have existing language/library requirements.
I'm not sure you appreciate why PHP was successful. You might be completely right about all this, but the LAMP-stack "just upload this file to shared hosting" workflow is what made apps like WordPress win out, and the barrier remains significantly higher to do the equivalent with Rust.
These april fools jokes keep getting lazier every year.
This part is interesting:
"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.
It's a shame they don't seem to try to address the divide between CMS's and static sites.
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.
EmDash with some aggressive caching and SWR is effectively this, and we're getting closer to that every day. When the cost of maintaining the data part of the CMS is effectively free, you're basically working with a static site anyway.
I haven’t used Wordpress for a few years. But with WP Super Cache (1) we also always did pretty much that: On saving a post/page the static HTML would be written to a cache directory and be the default content served to visitors.
[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
The issue with static sites is they can't do comments.
They can - it’s just more complex.
You just put the comments into something like firebase/supabase etc or use one of many off the shelf solutions. Free tier is fine.
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.
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".
Plugin security is one thing. Plugin budget is another thing... much larger of a problem in some cases.
Good one, at last, April fools joke with some effort.
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.
if this can implode the crooked "web hosting industry" that surrounds the lamp / wordpress ecosystem the better.
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
I've been wanting a CMS on top of Cloudflare workers for a while, so I hope this pays off!
Pages is a thin layer over Workers, and a standard deployment target for most if not all that I've seen.
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.
One thing that makes it different this time is that coding agents will probably make it easy to port the most important plugins to the new system.
Also, there are successful alternatives to Wordpress too, so the most likely outcome is that it becomes yet another alternative.
Will be there a way to export all the posts to markdown so you never get locked in?
Damm Anthropic had a chance to say april fools too for the claude code leak!!
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?
"Failed to initialize playground"
Try again once or twice.
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.
You seem to have missed the point. This is intended to be more secure in a new world where exploits will be cheap to discover. The factors you mention won't keep people onboard if systems are compromised every day in too many ways for fragmented security teams to keep on top of.
Payload
Impressive and created by agents. Another example for skeptics wondering where the AI apps are.
I think this is too soon to call. No one questions whether AI can build things. We question whether they can build stable things that work as expected and stay online in the long run.
I too have seen a lot of comments asking where the products are. If you're now moving the goal posts to "stay online in the long run" you're gonna have to wait until there's been a long run to stay online in. Agents aren't that old yet.
This will largely be based on the maintainers’ priorities. Coding agents can audit and clean up code too, provided that you set the right goals.
> "Failed to initialize playground"
Impressive indeed!
Try again a few times, it ends up loading.
did you test it? How do you know it works?
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!
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)
(All brains are clankers. We just don't have widespread recognition of that yet. Biological machines are still machines.)