271–280 of 558 posts
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.
In my view, Astro is the most reasonable choice for a blog-like website these days. All the simplicity and all the capabilities that you need. Excited to check this out and see what they have added on top of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a tough pill for some HNers to swallow, but with a good process, you can vibe-code really good software, and software far more tested, edge-cased, and thoughtful than you would have come up with, especially for software that isn't that one hobby passion project that you love thinking about.
I’ve said it before here, but my mind was swayed after talking with a product manager about AI coding. He offhandedly commented that “he’s been vibe coding for years, just with people”. He wasn’t thinking much about it at the time, but it resonated with me. To some agents are tools. To others they are employees.
> 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 power…
I love building static (or statically generated) websites, but all too often, customers want dynamic content. And what's worse, they don't tell you up-front, because they don't really understand the difference. "I need a website for my bakery". "What's supposed to be on it?" "Our address, opening times, a few pictures". I build them a static website. "Now I need a contact form". Ok, that doesn't really fit into a sta…
I got my start in webdev slinging WordPress sites like a lot of self taught devs and I definitely see the pain points now that I’ve moved on to more “engineering” focused development paradigms but the value proposition of WP has always been clear and present.
Given how WP leadership is all over the place at the moment, I can see how Cloudflare sees this as an opportunity to come in and peel away some market share when they can convince these current WP devs to adopt a little AI help and write applications for their platform instead.
Let’s see if it pays off!
Serious question: Why is everyone still using JavaScript to AI-code projects? You can vibe-code apps with real languages now. 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. A…
Perhaps I'm speaking out of depth because I haven't done a lot of Golang, but I've always thought of it as a systems language first, which means by necessity you have you to handle lower level problems yourself. I'm sure there's plenty of libraries that paper over this - but the philosophy of the languages themselves is different. Javascript was designed to solve CRUD like interfaces/problems quite well.
Maybe this is just an outdated argument though that isn't really relevant with modern golang/rust though.
> 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 ir…
Malus is (well crafted) satire.
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.
It looks like I'm in the minority after reading this comments, but I'm quite happy to see this announcement. 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…
I think the cynicism is related to cloudflares recent previous releases that were considered to be slop that significantly overpromised on its capabilities/completeness. Trust can take a long time to rebuild.
Other than that, it seems it might be a half decent headless CMS, if the bit of WordPress you want is its interface, and not the number of plugins and devs and not being tied to Cloudflare's infrastructure.
Is the second coming of Wordpress what we really need?