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EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

blog.cloudflare.com

431–440 of 558 posts

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use JSX in Astro if you prefer, but a CMS is more than just templates (not a LOT more I'd agree considering it's still static).

I know you can, but do blog-like sites really Island architecture? IMO most sites like that would be better to pick no-framework, vanilla or jQuery for interactivity. I can't image average WP users would be happy to move to EmDash, only to have a constant stream of dependabot updates for Astro. It has 55 direct (non-dev) dependencies https://www.npmjs.com/package/astro?activeTab=dependencies - while ejs has 0 and nun…

After all these cases like axios it's definitely reasonable. But many people already use Astro. And with static website there are far fewer attack surfaces compared to a full-on PHP running WordPress on a VPS.

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#432
post #429

Welp, it looks like if you selfhost, the sandboxing of plugins benefit goes out thr window from what I'm reading. What kind of open source is that? Opencore? More like openinsecure, for thr security version, pay the Piper. I might still give it a try, but I sure hope we can put monthly monetary ceiling, had ceilings on our accounts. Anyone knows if cost-caps are possible on CLOUDFLARE??

Honestly, you'll struggle to find a cloud platform cheaper than cloudflare. The $5/mo gets you 10 million dynamic requests (static assets are not included in this limit, so often a single pageview will be 1 dynamic request) and that would be across the whole workers product for your account, no extra pricing for extra websites, domains, or anything else like you'd see in most "wordpress hosting" I run all my personal…

I run a rust webserver on a €4 VPS from hetzner that serves 300M (million) requests a day. Way cheaper than doing that on _any_ "serverless" request-based platform, I think.

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#433
post #81

> 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 envis…

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.

So exactly like it is and has been for decades but instead of ads its micropayments

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm guessing that a lot of cynicism here is coming from ...the fact that CF just dumps tokens to generate some slop to compete with the single biggest web platform and casually adding a vendor lock in. It's just buzz, an inexpensive attempt to grab a valuable market share. If you set security as a selling point for EmDash, then I am baffled. The WP lock file has 30k lines, the brand new EmDash has 16k lines, but it…

Frankly, you're wrong. This is a fundamentally better plugin architecture that WP, and if you can't see it, then it's your understanding of security that's not right.

If you have arguments, then make them. This is just saying stuff for the sake of it.

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#436
post #242

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…

There are great standard CMSes that do everything technically better than Wordpress (not that it's harder to jump higher than a rock, but hey). That's not the hard part. Every developer should build a good CMS once. The hard part is displacing Wordpress market share; building a community of bloggers, marketeers, agencies, web designers, and so on; creating a huge ecosystem of paid and free plugins, allowing plugin de…

> There are great standard CMSes that do everything technically better than Wordpress

Like?

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#437

> 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 envis…

It's naive, nobody will pay, especially not AI companies.

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#438
An edge-first CMS is cool. I've wanted something that works well alongside Astro for ages.

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.

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#439
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Just" sure is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence.

[deleted]

Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

#440
I run a handful of WordPress sites. The plugin problem is real. I've spent more time managing plugin updates, conflicts, and security patches than actually building content for the sites.

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.

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