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EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

blog.cloudflare.com

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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Astro you can build a static site and if you do want dynamic content later on you can, so you aren't really backed into a corner nowadays.

Built on top of Cloudflare and Workers, I'm assuming this is meant to always build static and use Cloudflare's CDN for "static"

Astro is independent of Cloudflare and Workers; it can just output a bunch of flat html files you can do whatever you want with

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

#532
Reminds me of smartphone vendors declaring “iPhone killer” only to fade away. Premature to declare EmDash the successor . A competitor , maybe. Like SVN , and Perl 6, a better version of something popular is still bad .

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

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's not why Wordpress won. Every CMS was doing that, and far far better than Wordpress was or is doing even now, two decades later. WordPress had nothing on Joomla. Drupal was even better, but the barrier to entry was higher. The only reason WordPress won was that a template/theming ecosystem developed around it faster than anywhere else.

Ecosystem was a huge driver. But even before that, so so easy to get going. 5 minute guided install, if you're doing it yourself. Many web hosting providers auto-installed for you. No one could touch that ease to just get going.

I once did a review of CMSs to see "is there anything better out there?" Literally scores of options. At one point seemed like everyone had tried their hand at building a CMS. Installed maybe a dozen of the most promising. It was all very meh. Some had this nice feature or that (e.g. WYSIWYG editing, back when that wasn't table stacks). But overall, none seemed substantially better that WP, Drupal and Joomla among them. Most of them seemed blighted by comparison. Drupal and Joomla included. Nothing else out there seemed worthy of investing time and energy into.

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

#534
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of other comments saying this. It isn't that I don't understand, and need a clever metaphor. But to run with your metaphor, can we, maybe, just ignore the quacking since we all know that's just how you get attention these days and instead focus on that other stuff? Because it seems like asking about the duck mask will never produce a satisfactory answer and instead turn into a debate on the merits of d…

Obtuse and repetitive debates is what HN comments are for . :) But in this case it feels less like somebody has launched a revolutionary new product and HN is debating the MIT licence and landing page weight, and more like somebody has announced they've a plug-in replacement for a popular repository with a troll post and HN chooses not to spend enough time on Github to discover the all-star team and excellent archite…

> Obtuse and repetitive debates is what HN comments are for. :)

Fair

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

#536

From the readme on GitHub: > 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!

this is how they used to teach people to type on typewriters — don't see it that often these days

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

#537

> 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…

Slightly late to this party, but in my opinion, this doesn't go nearly far enough. This solution will be relevant for 12 months in it's current form. If it adapts further, it might have legs.

I've built Wordpress sites for 12 years. Very few Wordpress developers are trying to swap to a slightly upgraded version of the same thing with no ecosystem and much of the same solutions. This will see some adoption, no doubt, but not a serious dent.

The main reason for that: in 12 months, 24 months, 36 months, this solution will be outdated and unimportant, same as Wordpress. Wordpress will still be kicking because it already has a 40% market share on the entire internet. This, however, will not be.

The CMS is dead tech in six to twelve months. I might have a million people who will disagree with me (and yes, people will still use CMS's after twelve months), but people actually moving into the future will have dropped CMS's for architectures that are AI first with strong, intuitive, easy-to-leverage guardrails.

In my opinion, the vast majority of people are still looking at AI through the lens of "how does it alter my current work/tech stack/strategy" and failing to ask the proper question: "what the hell is even important in a world where AI is as competent as 90% of humans and 100x faster?"

What do you need a CMS for? You think you'll be managing the content? Why? Why do I want a human managing content when the AI does it 100x as fast? Why do I want Astro? It compiles down nicely? Okay, maybe its a god-tier solution, but more likely... AI can just code extremely fast vanilla html/css/js. Why do I need a component library when AI can steal all the best components from all the best libraries? Why do I need "Portable Text"?

This is still not big picture enough. Think further out than 12 months.

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

#538

> 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…

My wife's wordpress blog has at least 5 different plug-ins for publishing an article without a header. Every time I fix it for her by removing all but 1 plug-in, she'll install a million others because that's what ChatGPT told her to do.

I have no hope nor expectations of non-technical people performing technical tasks no matter how advanced AI becomes. The only solution is a platform/CMS that already has the all bells and whistles included.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a dev/test/prod workflow involved copying filesystem content, database content, and changing URLs that got saved in the database. This just sounds like deploying web software. You always have static assets that need to be deployed, the code/binary itself, and database migrations.

The "copying filesystem content, database content" part of that is perfectly sane. I should have phrased that better. The insane part is the search-and-replace on the database backup to find hard-coded URLs referencing the environment's hostname. That's ridiculous. It speaks to the lack of serious operational experience that went into building the software.

Ah. That’s like a 15-line rite-of-passage plugin you write once and never have to worry about it again. Filter content going into the database and use relative uri for the same site. Configure everything else via environment variables.

I moved away from Wordpress altogether earlier this year because I got tired of babysitting MySQL.

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