EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
blog.cloudflare.com
EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
1–10 of 558 posts
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#2Here 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)
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#3I've been wanting a CMS on top of Cloudflare workers for a while, so I hope this pays off!
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#4The power of WordPress is not the ease of use, but PHP.
Anything built on PHP will be widely used, like Laravel
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#5Its 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.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#6The 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.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#7> 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.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#8Yes 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.
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#9> 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…
Sure, but if I want to host my static files on a website where they are easily cached... cloudflare also offers this product?
Re: EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
#10The power of WordPress is not the ease of use, but PHP. Anything built on PHP will be widely used, like Laravel
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.