[HN Gopher] EmDash - a spiritual successor to WordPress that sol...
___________________________________________________________________
EmDash - a spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin
security
Author : elithrar
Score : 415 points
Date : 2026-04-01 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| vessenes wrote:
| 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)
| bo0tzz wrote:
| I've been wanting a CMS on top of Cloudflare workers for a while,
| so I hope this pays off!
| OJFord wrote:
| Pages is a thin layer over Workers, and a standard deployment
| target for most if not all that I've seen.
| paulpopus wrote:
| Payload can be deployed to Cloudflare Workers:
| https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/tree/main/templates/wi...
| kocialnews wrote:
| The power of WordPress is not the ease of use, but PHP.
|
| Anything built on PHP will be widely used, like Laravel
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| Historically successful.
|
| Draging a bunch of PHP files onto an FTP client is harder
| than modern dev practices.
|
| If you've got a modern frontend of any kind, you're already
| beyond this.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| These april fools jokes keep getting lazier every year.
| onion2k wrote:
| 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.
| misiek08 wrote:
| That's also nice joke! You are all killing it today
| trvz wrote:
| Well, you're quite fucking wrong there.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| With PHP you can still drop a single file on shared hosting
| and be up in minutes, with no build step or CDN proxy in the
| mix.
|
| npm deps adds plenty of attack surface on its own. Netlify is
| fine until you need custom binaries or persistent storage,
| then it gets weird fast. PHP has plenty of warts, but the ops
| path stays flatter than Node for the boring case most sites
| need.
| nullable_bool wrote:
| 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.
| reddalo wrote:
| But isn't this a well-curated April Fools?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| 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.
| squidbeak wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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.
| airza wrote:
| Sure, but if I want to host my static files on a website where
| they are easily cached... cloudflare also offers this product?
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| tadfisher wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| Reading this paragraph I was genuinely convinced it was an
| April 1st thing.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| 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."
| yurishimo wrote:
| There are two types of WordPress sites from my perspective as
| someone who got their start in webdev in that ecosystem.
|
| The first and arguably largest is exactly what you describe.
| Little sites for small businesses who just want an online
| presence and maybe to facilitate some light duty business
| development with a small webshop or forum. These sites are
| done by fly by night marketers who are also hawking SEO
| optimization and ads on Facebook and they'll host your site
| for the low low price of $100/mo while dodging your phone
| calls when the godaddy $5/mo plan they are actually hosting
| your site on shits the bed.
|
| The second, and more influential group of WordPress users,
| are very large organizations who publish a lot of content and
| need something that is flexible, reasonably scalable and
| cheap to hire developers for. Universities love WP because
| they can setup multisite and give every student in every
| class a website with some basic plugins and then it's
| handsoff. Go look at the logo list for WordPress VIP to see
| what media organizations are powered by WP. Legit newsrooms
| run on mostly stock WP backends but with their own designers
| and some custom publishing workflows.
|
| These two market segments are so far apart though that it
| creates a lot of division and friction from lots of different
| angles. Do you cater to the small businesses and just accept
| that they'll outgrow the platform someday? Or do you build
| stuff that makes the big publishers happy because the pay for
| most of the engineering talent working on the open source
| project more generally? And all that while maintaining
| backwards compatibility and somewhat trying to keep up with
| modern-ish practices (they did adopt React after all).
|
| WordPress is weird and in no way a monoculture is what I
| guess I'm trying to say.
| riffraff wrote:
| Are you sure the admin notices and sidebar are not plugin
| issues?
|
| I use Wordpress for my blog because I stopped caring about
| maintaining one, and I'm mildly confident wp will be around
| for 10 more years.
|
| There are basically no notices and the admin sidebar is ~10
| obvious entries (home, posts, pages, comments, appearance,
| settings etc).
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| I hated Wordpress so much that when the clients wanted an
| admin dashboard I used a neat PHP CMS called Kirby. It was
| awesome back then! So simple
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| vetrom wrote:
| It looks like they rolled it so you can plug in local
| components of your choice, though? The security model does
| assume you have MAC containerized environments available at
| your fingertips though, so having something like DHH's once is
| probably a soft minimal dependency if you want to do-it-
| yourself.
| omnimus wrote:
| I am confused - what are the good "websites" roots? Server-side
| rendered or not?
| eloisant wrote:
| Websites used to be static html files.
|
| You either write them by hand, or use a tool that generates
| it locally, upload everything and you're done. Perfect
| security. Great performances.
|
| It's in this sense that static generators go back to the
| source, the simply produce dumb HTML files that you
| upload/publish to a web server that doesn't need to run any
| code. Just serve files.
| omnimus wrote:
| Imho CMS is just a tool that generates static html files on
| the server. The distinction is a bit artificial. CMSes have
| static html cashing and CDNs will allow you to "one-click"
| firewall the dynamic administration and cache the static
| html for you.
|
| Static website generators are cool way for programmers to
| do that work on their machine but in the end the
| distinction of what gets served is very small (if you set
| up the basics).
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| If it uses Astro, then it's a literal static website generator.
| But with modern React components if you need anything on top of
| this. The same with plugins, I assume people don't have to use
| those but the important thing is that you can if you want to.
| perlgeek wrote:
| 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
| static website, but I can hack something together. "Now I need
| to show inventory, and allow customers to pre-order". A static
| website won't cut it anymore.
|
| When you develop for clients, especially those that you don't
| know very well, it's a bad idea to back yourself into a corner
| that's not very extensible. So from that perspective, I really
| get why they give plugins such a central spot.
| yurishimo wrote:
| This is the main reason why WordPress is so popular still to
| this day. You can cache the crap out of the frontend to the
| point that it's basically a static site at that point but
| then it's still all running on top of a dynamic platform if
| you need that flexibility in the future.
|
| 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!
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| Astro supports generating static html, so I suspect it'll work
| similarly where you can have some routes static and others
| dynamically created.
| halapro wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| Not an April fools joke. [0]
|
| [0] https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
| quantummagic wrote:
| That makes it look _more_ like an April fools joke. All the
| commits are from today.
| OJFord wrote:
| That's not unusual though, large companies releasing
| something open source very often squash the history at
| launch.
| george_perez wrote:
| 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.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| The best jokes are serious.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| halapro wrote:
| 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.
| rectang wrote:
| 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.
| danudey wrote:
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Matt seemed pretty fine with the name for at least 14
| years, including investing in them at one point.
| echelon wrote:
| Matt got upset because they forked his open source project
| and built a hundred million dollar revenue business on top
| of it without contributing anything back to WordPress.
|
| He'd have more of a leg to stand on if WordPress wasn't
| itself a fork of an open source project.
|
| Matt should have built something open core or fair source
| licensed - free for customers, but stops competitors from
| stealing your lunch. He has no legal ground to argue his
| case now.
|
| It's a much bigger deal with hyperscalers poaching and
| stealing, like AWS and GCP ripping off and stealing most of
| the revenue from Redis and Elasticsearch. That's dishonest
| and evil in my mind.
|
| Totally orthogonal to this issue of marketing comparisons.
| chuckadams wrote:
| WPE never forked a thing. They were a successful company
| after he backed out of an investment with them, he
| resented the success, blackmailed them for 8% of their
| top-line revenue, then threw a tantrum when they told him
| to pound sand.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I'd really love to see Matt go after CloudFlare over the
| trademark. WPE might grind him into the dust, but CF will
| obliterate every constituent atom.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| >> It's not illegal to make product comparisons. That's
| just competition.
|
| > Tell that to the guy who got upset with WP Engine.
|
| Why? That situation had nothing to do with comparisons.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Impressive and created by agents. Another example for skeptics
| wondering where the AI apps are.
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| 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.
| saadn92 wrote:
| The stability question is real but I think it's framed wrong.
| The issue isn't whether an agent can write correct code in a
| single session -- they can, and pretty reliably now. It's
| whether there's a human with enough understanding of the
| codebase to debug it when something breaks at 2am.
|
| I run parallel coding agents on my own projects daily. The
| code they produce is fine. What worries me is the "just ship
| it" energy where nobody on the team deeply understands what
| got built. That's not an AI problem, it's been a problem with
| outsourced codebases forever. AI just makes it faster to
| accumulate code nobody fully groks.
|
| Cloudflare probably has the engineering depth to maintain
| this regardless of how it was built. A lot of other teams
| don't.
| carlos-menezes wrote:
| > "Failed to initialize playground"
|
| Impressive indeed!
| vntok wrote:
| Try again a few times, it ends up loading.
| MrFurious wrote:
| The successor to WordPress will wear out the F5 key
| 101008 wrote:
| did you test it? How do you know it works?
| jmkni wrote:
| It's kind of ironic that the name of this product is also the
| most obvious marker of LLM generated content
| benob wrote:
| "That allows us to license the open source project under the
| more permissive MIT license."
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's the joke.
| jmkni wrote:
| Oh I am slow lol
|
| Is this an April fools?
| vetrom wrote:
| Functional April Fools, the best kind. A couple years ago
| Eleiko, a weightlifting equipment company did one, the
| 'Heavy Mug', a 19 poundish steel coffee cup with a handle
| in the style of a knurled bar, and actually did a limited
| run of them.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Name is a joke, but the project is real
| megnu wrote:
| 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".
| mrcwinn wrote:
| 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?
| pxtail wrote:
| Good one, at last, April fools joke with some effort.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| 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.
|
| E2: Apparently not a joke.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| There's always https://textpattern.com/ which is also as old as
| Wordpress (older?) and better coded. (See also
| thttps://textpattern.org/ ).
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| hatmanstack wrote:
| There might be pie on your face but they stole my line,
| https://github.com/HatmanStack/kill-wordpress
| 8organicbits wrote:
| 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.
| hatmanstack wrote:
| Just measured your visit, zing.
| kbdot wrote:
| 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.
| benatkin wrote:
| 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".
| a57721 wrote:
| Isn't it normal for the initial commit to be large?
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| 8 years later and now I'm getting the 4 1's joke.
| avarun wrote:
| I still don't get it
| riffraff wrote:
| I interpreted it back then as just following the
| tradition of 8.8.8.8, 4.4.4.4, 2.2.2.2
| switz wrote:
| 4 1's == 4/1
|
| could just be a coincidence
| alt219 wrote:
| 1.1.1.1 has 4 1's, as in 4/1, as in April 1 (or so I
| assume).
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 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
| busterarm wrote:
| > 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| yep. we like it because with shopify or other platforms,
| you run into limitations. with Wordpress I can literally
| just whip it into whatever shape i want.
| sp1nningaway wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| Yes! I'm locked into WordPress, which I hate, because it's
| the only platform that will allow a non-developer to
| maintain it if I get hit by a bus.
| busterarm wrote:
| Which also allows you to not be on call 24/7.
|
| A decade ago I had to learn and run WordPress for a job.
| I held my nose up the stink was so bad. But quickly I
| learned how to manage it and have modern sensible
| practices around it and I've probably gotten more real
| value out of it than any other CMS or web framework I've
| touched. That includes Rails.
|
| Thankfully I don't have to do that anymore, but you can
| sanely and safely run WordPress today and there's zero
| shame in it.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are options that can be run by anyone, but they're
| often very constrained in what they can do and show.
|
| Wordpress is solidly in that middle ground where you can
| do a large amount of customization if someone'll pay for
| it, and then they can do the day-to-day care and feeding
| of it.
|
| Everything else has either been much worse in all
| possible ways (Joomla!) or has been a collection of
| developer wish-lists unusable by anyone (Drupal).
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I started building sites for clients in the late '90's,
| and quickly made "client can edit their phone number on
| all pages" a key requirement. Wordpress with a WYSIWYG
| page builder solves that -- it's not the only solution,
| but it works pretty close to right out of the box.
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Hm, you might want to catch up on the Wordpress "open source"
| drama with WP.com vs .org, WP engine and Matt.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I can assure you this is not an April Fools. Cloudflare does
| not do that. This is a real project.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I can assure you this is not an April Fools. Cloudflare does
| not do that._
|
| It should. I miss the days when tech was interesting and fun.
|
| Even Steve Jobs, for all his later-day revisionist hard-assed
| reputation, enjoyed the occasional Easter egg, inside joke,
| or April Fool's joke.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I hated that shit. I'd load Slashdot and there was no real
| content or it was difficult to find real news amongst all
| the crap. It's not funny. It's annoying.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I feel bad for you. That's a lot of anger over virtually
| nothing.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Would you be annoyed if HN went offline just for the hell
| of it for a day every year?
|
| But you're right, I was an extremely angry person back
| then. Many years of therapy and deliberate ongoing work
| and I'm a radically different man. Thank goodness I got
| to the other side.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Would you be annoyed if HN went offline just for the
| hell of it for a day every year?_
|
| No. Not even a little. HN is not food. HN is not water.
| HN is not my family or my job or in any way vital to my
| life. It's an amusement. A diversion.
|
| I am not a FOMO victim.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Some of the april fools things can be annoying, but I
| have a big shrug for there being less real news for a
| day. Anything important will get through and most days
| don't have much interesting news anyway.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| I appreciate a good April Fools joke, I also appreciate
| CloudFlare's approach of "we're extra serious today, here's
| some useful stuff for ya"
| sophacles wrote:
| There were some years in the 90s and early 2ks that had
| good april fool's jokes, and that was what bubbled up. Not
| everyone did, so the novelty also made the "meh" ones seem
| better. By 2008ish everyone was doing one, and most of them
| weren't very good. By 2012ish marketing got involved and
| almost all of them were terrible and unfunny.
|
| It was a nice tradition but, like many things, the scene
| got too big and corporate. It was a zombie tradition for a
| while then slowly faded away.
|
| In fact when cloudflare started releasing serious things on
| 4/1, I found it to be a refreshing subversion of the trope.
| codeulike wrote:
| Its impressive work from CF that lots of people in this thread
| are unsure whether its a joke or not, like a delicately
| balanced april fools for the hn crowd
| reddalo wrote:
| Oh, come on. It must be a joke. They can't be serious with this
| sloppy thing.
| gbibas wrote:
| Building plugins across WordPress and Shopify right now -- can
| confirm the ecosystem is the entire moat. The code quality is
| genuinely terrible, but it doesn't matter because every SaaS
| tool on earth has a WordPress connector.
|
| The real test for any WordPress replacement: can a non-
| technical business owner hire someone on Fiverr to customize it
| in an afternoon? WordPress passes that test. Nothing else does.
| That's not a technology problem, it's a labor market problem.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I did that once, employed someone on Fiverr to do a WordPress
| site. They installed a load of plugins for no reason, made a
| mess, then gave me my money back. I went back to a static
| site.
|
| That has been my experience, low barrier to entry, low price,
| shoddy work. Or hire an agency, pay top dollar for little
| work.
| yeah879846 wrote:
| "Failed to initialize playground"
| vntok wrote:
| Try again once or twice.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| 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.
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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!_
| woodylondon wrote:
| 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
| AIorNot wrote:
| Damm Anthropic had a chance to say april fools too for the claude
| code leak!!
| bbx wrote:
| 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.
| tamimio wrote:
| Will be there a way to export all the posts to markdown so you
| never get locked in?
| spankalee wrote:
| 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.
| MattieTK wrote:
| 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.
| Y-bar wrote:
| 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/
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The issue with static sites is they can't do comments.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "Just" sure is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this
| sentence.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Is it still a static site then?
|
| You could just do it with CGI scripts, without the external
| dependencies, but that isn't really static either.
| DANmode wrote:
| I run static sites for my clients, with embedded forms.
|
| Performance says they're definitely still static sites!
| Closi wrote:
| Depends what you would call that architecture then I
| guess!
|
| I run my local theatre website by writing the posts in
| markdown, and then have some github actions which use
| Hugo to turn it in to a static site and then uploads the
| content to an S3 bucket. The site itself has dynamic
| content like within-website ticket buying from eventbrite
| and a contact form that sends email using an external
| service. It also calls in things like google analytics.
|
| Does this still count as static? Personally I think so,
| Even though there are 'dynamic' elements.
|
| IMO static refers more about how the content is served
| rather than saying that the content can't be 'dynamic' as
| lots of Wordpress sites have static/non interactive
| content but still regenerate the html on each page load.
| input_sh wrote:
| Astro would call that an island:
| https://docs.astro.build/en/concepts/islands/
|
| I guess this is our answer to the question of why Cloudflare
| acquired it in the first place.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I bet 99.9% of live Wordpress sites no longer have comments
| enabled.
| spankalee wrote:
| So many WordPress sites don't have comments.
| pwython wrote:
| I've been migrating a few Wordpress sites from Wordpress to
| Astro + Strapi recently, working in 'hybrid mode' so the entire
| site is static except for post previews in Strapi (only that
| one route is SSR).
|
| Editing content in Strapi, once customized with CKEditor and
| such, is Wordpressy enough for the human Editors familiar with
| WP.
|
| So far I'm loving the stack.
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| > 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
| danudey wrote:
| 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.
| akktor wrote:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's like the exploit from Office Space is finally legal.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| 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.
| _cloned wrote:
| Payload
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Plugin security is one thing. Plugin budget is another thing...
| much larger of a problem in some cases.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| > 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Last time I checked Wordpress was completely fine living in a
| couple of PHP files on a webspace. That's like the pinnacle of
| ,,serverless", is it not?
| rgbrenner wrote:
| mysql/mariadb and the shared filesystem requirements are a
| bit different than what lambda/etc provides. So not really,
| but it's all solvable clearly.
| Levitating wrote:
| I don't like where any of this is going
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I missed this. So they didn't really solve much at all. I guess
| at least it's _compatible_ with other runtimes. But yeah, who
| would've guessed that Cloudflare software would (besides being
| vibeslop) prefer Cloudflare infra. This, of course, makes the
| software quite hard to adopt.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| > Open source but architecturally locked in.
|
| You hit the nail on the head.
|
| Cloudflare's new business model is to find popular OSS
| projects, create a vibe coded alternative that only runs on
| Cloudflare's infrastructure.
| frizlab wrote:
| Sadly, it looks more and more like it. It's sad, because they
| were doing wonderful stuff.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| Agreed. They are destroying their professional reputation.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I think pretty much every corporation that can have had this
| thought, has had it. Really "any popular software" where they
| can provide similar functionality. And I think this is going
| to happen more often before it becomes less common.
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe other runtimes should copy dynamic workers.
| arcfour wrote:
| Workerd (the platform for Workers) is open source though? You
| could run your own? And people do run their own, at least
| according to Cloudflare.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > 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.
| lurkshark wrote:
| Malus is (well crafted) satire.
| richbell wrote:
| https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_.
| ..
| earthlingdavey wrote:
| So well crafted in-fact, that if you pay them, they will
| provide the service.
| riffic wrote:
| if this can implode the crooked "web hosting industry" that
| surrounds the lamp / wordpress ecosystem the better.
| paoliniluis wrote:
| Who wants to vibe code an open source Cloudflare?
| gsmiznith wrote:
| 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.
| password4321 wrote:
| If you need a reliable source for WordPress plugins, check out
| https://github.com/fairpm/fair-plugin?tab=readme-ov-file#fai...
|
| _A system for using Federated and Independent Repositories in
| WordPress_
| solarkraft wrote:
| Convince me this isn't vibeslop.
|
| If Cloudflare really have radically changed their software
| development philosophy lately, this would actually be an
| interesting project, being based on Astro and coming with some
| APIs for programmatic management.
|
| Them being so happy about the ,,cost of software development" and
| not going very deep into ecosystem, community or project
| management doesn't convince me that this is going to be a
| worthwhile project, even if, unlike their previous vibe coding
| demos, this one actually works.
| flakiness wrote:
| If you read the first few sentences...
|
| > But for the past two months our agents have been working on
| an even more ambitious project: rebuilding the WordPress open
| source project from the ground up.
|
| They have honed their AI OSS troll marketing chop and every
| step goes far and far. I'll take it more seriously once they
| start open sourcing vibe coded projects they actually use in
| their production.
| ascorbic wrote:
| I'm the main engineer on this. I've also been on the Astro core
| team for two years, so I do think I understand real open source
| software and community.
|
| As the post implies, I did use a lot of agent time on this, but
| this isn't a vibe-coded weekend project. I've been working full
| time on this since mid-January.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| will all my custom Wordpress themes and plugins run on
| EmDash?
| billyhoffman wrote:
| For plugins, no.
|
| 1- EmDash plugins are written in TypeScript, not PHP
|
| 2- EmDash plugins have a specific permissions model, where
| they need to explicitly request access to certain things.
|
| 3- WordPress plugins just invoke things. EmDash plugins
| have a defined API you use to talk to different
| capabilitites
|
| 4- Those capabilities are totally different, and at a
| different abstraction, than what WordPress provides.
|
| Beyond the look of the admin interface and publishing flow,
| I don't see how this is a "Spirtual Successor" to WordPress
| at all. Its a CMS, designed from scratch, for a serverless
| world, using CF proprietary capabilities (D1 Databases, R2
| for image/media storage, their workers for running things).
| bombcar wrote:
| [flagged]
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| how long should it take to gain your confidence? how did
| you arrive at your number?
|
| the state of the art of software engineering is to use AI.
| it's just reality
| hexo wrote:
| how long? 10 years
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| There's a big difference between the two. If you still
| think agent-guided development doesnt work well, you need
| to update your priors
| Diti wrote:
| The slow enshittification of every product touched by
| LLMs these last few years (ESPECIALLY by Microsoft, who
| goes all-in) kind of "disproves" your point.
|
| Reliable agent-coded development only seems to work for
| small codebases. (And it's amazing in Ruby for some
| reasons.)
| andoando wrote:
| Agent coded != vibe coded.
|
| I don't write code manually anymore, but Im still getting
| the exact code output that I want.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| vibe coding implies a complete lack of process. The
| definition is basically YOLO....
|
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| My process is just getting claude code to generate a plan
| file and then rinsing it through codex until it has no
| more advice left.
|
| I'd consider it vibe-coding if you never read the
| code/plan.
|
| For example, you could package this up in a bash alias
| `vibecode "my prompt"` instead of `claude -p "my prompt"`
| and it surely is still vibe-coding so long as you remain
| arms length from the plan/code itself.
| thejazzman wrote:
| Shhhhh stop telling them! We don't need more competition
| :)
| hatmanstack wrote:
| This, but I think everybody that's awake knows this. I
| still not a fan of this project regardless, it's
| polishing a turd.
| andoando wrote:
| I mean to be fair, if you are using agents more than
| likely you are not thinking about aspects of the code as
| deeply as you would have before. If you write things
| yourself you spend far more time thinking about every
| little decision that you're making.
|
| Even for tests, I always thought the real valuable part
| of it was that it forced you to think about all the
| different cases, and that just having bunch of green
| checkboxes if anything was luring developers into a false
| sense of security
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| There's definitely a trade-off, but it's a lopsided one
| that favors AI.
|
| Before AI, you were often encumbered with the superficial
| aspects of a plan or implementation. So much that we
| often would start implementing first and then kinda feel
| it out as we go, saving advanced considerations and edge-
| cases for the future since we're not even sure what the
| impl will be.
|
| That's useful for getting a visceral read on how a
| solution might feel in its fetal stage. But it takes a
| lot of time/energy/commitment to look into the future to
| think about edge cases, tests, potential requirement
| churn, alternative options, etc. and planning today
| around that.
|
| With AI, agents are really good at running preformed
| ideas to their conclusion and then fortify it with edge-
| cases, tests, and trade-offs. Now your expertise is
| better spent deciding among trade-offs and deciding on
| what the surface area looks like.
|
| Something that also just came to mind is that before AI,
| you would get married to a solution/abstraction because
| it would be too expensive to rewrite code/tests. But now,
| refactoring and updating tests is trivial. You aren't
| committed to a bad solution anymore. Or, your tests are
| kinda lame and brittle because they're vibe-coded (as
| opposed to not existing at all)? Ok, AI will change them
| for you.
|
| I also think we accidentally put our foot on the scale in
| these comparisons. The pre-AI developer we'll imagine as
| a unicorn who always spends time getting into the weeds
| to suss out the ideal solution of every ticket with
| infinite time and energy and enthusiasm. The post-AI
| developer we'll imagine as someone who is incompetent.
| And we'll pit them against each other to say "See?
| There's a regression".
| andoando wrote:
| I think I agree. Fast iteration in many cases > long
| thought out ideas going the wrong direction. The issue is
| purely a mentality one where AI makes it really easy to
| push features fast without spending as much time thinking
| through them.
|
| That said, iteration is much more difficult on
| established codebases, especially with production
| workflows where you need to be more than extra careful
| your migration is backwards compatible, doesn't mess up
| feature x,y,z,d across 5 different projects relying on
| some field or logical property.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Unless you go through the code with a tooth comb, you're
| not even aware of what trade-offs the AI has made for
| you.
|
| We've all just seen the Claude Code source code. 4k class
| files. Weird try/catches. Weird trade-offs. Basic bugs
| people have been begging to fix left untouched.
|
| Yes, there's a revolution happening. Yes, it makes you
| more productive.
|
| But stop huffing the kool-aid and be realistic. If you
| think you're still deciding about the trade-offs, I can
| tell you with sincerity that you should go try and
| refactor some of the code you're producing and see what
| trade-offs the AI is ACTUALLY making.
|
| Until you actually work with the code again, it's
| ridiculously easy to miss the trade-offs the AI is making
| while it's churning out it's code.
|
| I know this because we've got some AI heavy users on our
| team who often just throwing the AI code straight into
| the repo with properly checking it. And worse, on a code
| review, it looks right, but then when something goes
| wrong, you go "why did they make that decision?". And
| then you notice there's a very AI looking comment next to
| the code. And it clicks.
|
| They didn't make that decision, they didn't choose
| between the trade-offs, the AI did.
|
| I've seen weird timezone decisions, sorting, insane error
| catching theatre, changing parts of the code it shouldn't
| have even looked at, let alone changed. In the FE sphere
| it's got no clue how to use UseEffect or UseMemoization,
| it litters every div with tons of unnecessary CSS, it
| can't split up code for shit, in the backend world it's
| insanely bad at following prior art on things like what's
| the primary key field, what's the usual sorting priority,
| how it's supposed to use existing user contexts, etc.
|
| And the amount of times it uses archaic code, from
| versions of the language 5-10 years ago is really
| frustrating. At least with Typescript + C#. With C# if
| you see anything that doesn't use the simpler namespacing
| or doesn't use primary constructors it's a dead give-away
| that it was written with AI.
| bombcar wrote:
| I feel this is the key - three years ago everyone on HN
| would be able to define "technical debt" and how it was
| bad and they hated it but had to live with it.
|
| We've now build a machine capable of something that can't
| even be called "technical debt" anymore - perhaps
| "technical usury" or something, and we're all supposed to
| love it.
|
| Most coders know that support and maintenance of code
| will far outlast and out weigh the effort required to
| build it.
| sph wrote:
| Produce this "far more tested, edge-cased, and
| thoughtful" vibe-coded software for us to judge, please.
|
| All I hear are empty promises of better software, and in
| the same breath the declaration that quality is overrated
| and time-to-ship is why vibecoding will eventually win.
| It's either one, or the other.
| mbreese wrote:
| 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.
| IrishTechie wrote:
| I had a similar realisation in IT support - I regularly
| discover the answers I get from junior-to mid-level
| engineers need to be verified, are based on false
| assumption or are wildly wrong, so why am I being so
| critical of LLM responses. Hopefully some day they'll
| make it to senior engineer levels of reasoning, but in
| the meantime they're just as good as many on the teams I
| work with and so have their place.
| dominotw wrote:
| its the same thing. no one can keep up with their plan
| mode/spec driven whatever process. All agent driven
| projects become vibe coded "this is not working"
| projects.
|
| Lot of ppl are only in the beginning stages so they think
| its different because they came up with some fancy
| looking formal process to generate vibe.
| teekert wrote:
| I started calling it LLM assisted coding. If you know what
| you're doing but use LLMs to do tedious stuff and educate
| yourself on the unfamiliar bits you can move quite fast.
| The term vibe coding does not do that process justice imho.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The term vibe coding does not do that process justice
| imho.
|
| Well that's because _actual_ vibe coding is a completely
| separate thing from "LLM assisted coding, know what
| you're doing but use LLMs to do tedious stuff".
|
| I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "started calling
| it", but vibe coding doesn't need a new name, it needs
| people to be clear about what they mean.
| _puk wrote:
| Vybrid coding :)
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| This crap thinking has to stop, not everything is "hey
| agent do this" then sit, wait and publish as is. Also this
| is a Cloudflare official software, do you REALLY think this
| is 100% vibe coded without human intervention? Come on...
| well_ackshually wrote:
| Considering Cloudflare shat out slop in the form of a
| "complete rewrite of NextJS in one weekend" and proudly
| put out a blog post (https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/)
| despite how absolutely dogshit it is:
|
| yeah.
| eis wrote:
| After https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516 ?
| Yes, one can unfortunately put that into the realm of
| reality.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| While I agree with your first sentence, I haven't been
| impressed with cloudflare's AI track record. I think my
| expectations for "cloudflare software on the HN front
| page that was significantly AI coded" are _lower_ than
| "random guy's software on the HN front page that was
| significantly AI coded".
| QuantumGood wrote:
| What are some other candidates in the "most meaningless new
| term" awards category? "Vibe coding" seems like the best in
| a generation. Even with a lot of clarifying qualifications,
| it often still seems fundamentally meaningless / open to
| interpretation / triggers commenters based on their priors.
| sillywabbit wrote:
| Using the word priors in the way you (and others) do.
| penglish1 wrote:
| Exactly. It might be fine. It might even be great!
|
| But no matter how much code, including tests that AI can
| generate there was only one human thinking about those
| prompts, for a few months.
|
| Any defects in that single human's thought process for
| overall architecture, security architecture, test
| architecture and coverage were not reviewed by any other
| human who might think differently and catch things that
| were missed. Ideally they were all at least reviewed by AI,
| but how differently operate from itself? It isn't
| particularly good at detecting its own errors without a
| human telling it to, which means the human needs to detect
| it in the first place.
|
| Perhaps my most important point here is simply everyone
| here on HN is aware of all of these things, and as excited
| as some of us are about AI coded endeavors, the top
| response here will likely be the top response for many
| years - how do I know it isn't garbage? AI might be able to
| generate code fast, but informed users will definitely
| develop trust in it on a more human time scale.
|
| I think the core idea of addressing a core architecture
| security defect in Wordpress has a legs. I'd make the case
| that the security architecture demonstrated here is table
| stakes for new software projects in 2026 when it clearly
| wasn't really conceivable in 2003. Though I'd also argue
| that many of the top Wordpress plugins should be shipped as
| "batteries included" in any successor, spiritual or
| otherwise - it would remain important to be extensible
| beyond those, securely.
|
| A spiritual successor to Wordpress designed to run modern
| cloud infrastructure is a neat thing no doubt.
|
| But after handling a bunch of horrible Wordpress and PHP
| stuff in my life lately, I'm tacking a bit of begging onto
| my hopefully useful response. Someone, anyone, AI coded or
| not, please work on a COMPLETE successor to Wordpress. And
| PHP really - though I do think taking care of Wordpress
| would entirely deal with the PHP problem.
|
| What do I mean? All the modern table stakes stuff: * API
| first * fast bits in Rust (or Zig whatever IDK) * WASM *
| modern security architecture * batteries included - it is
| extremely dumb to have to add a plugin for
| calendars/dates/events and have about 100+ options for
| those. * designed to be deployed into modern clouds.. but
| also self-hostable on a single server, or colocated by
| small (cheap!) providers - ie: addressing ALL of the user
| base of Wordpress * one-click migration from Wordpress.
| Wordpress does this "with itself" to allow admins to move
| from one provider to another. Without this feature, might
| as well not bother
|
| There is a business opportunity here I believe, though I'm
| not proposing a business model per se. A lot of people,
| myself included pay for Wordpress hosting while also hating
| it and being ready to leap at an alternative - even if it
| cost more.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Why would you gut the credibility of the project for that
| tagline then: why not skip mentioning agents?
|
| You even open the article by linking the toy project where
| you used agents to "recreate Next in a week" and released
| with critical vulnerabilities.
| zsoltkacsandi wrote:
| This doesn't really address the concern.
|
| The question isn't whether this took longer than a weekend or
| whether you personally have open source experience, it's
| whether Emdash is actually being built as an open ecosystem
| or as a Cloudflare-bound platform. Bringing up your
| background reads like using prior credibility to justify the
| project's quality, instead of demonstrating it.
|
| If it only runs properly on Cloudflare's infrastructure, then
| invoking "understanding open source and community" feels
| misleading. Those values usually imply portability and
| independent ecosystem growth, not tight platform coupling.
|
| Also, "not vibeslop" here isn't about effort, it's about
| whether there's a clear, defensible reason this exists beyond
| being an AI-accelerated WordPress-like system tied to one
| vendor.
| odst wrote:
| I think one of the reasons people think this is slop is
| because of the name. How does the name EmDash relate to being
| a wordpress spiritual successor? It's clear the name was
| chosen as it relates to the use of em dashes in AI generated
| text, so why would you want to be associated with that? Why
| not choose a name like Astro Press given your experience on
| Astro?
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| > It's clear the name was chosen as it relates to the use
| of em dashes in AI generated text
|
| this is not clear to me, and is not discussed in the
| article
|
| you can like or dislike the name. but criticizing the
| quality of work based on your affinity for the name is
| foolishness
| cush wrote:
| It doesn't need to be said in the article, it's obvious.
| EmDash is a term associated with slop.
| rovr138 wrote:
| Well, an em dash is used in text to identify a pause or
| alternatives in the text.
|
| ..so like a fork in the way it's done, a new way of doing
| things.
|
| But you need to remove the dev/ai hat in order to go back
| to writing rules and the real use.
| cush wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted. The name is so bad.
| WordPress is a great name for normies. Something like
| Cloudflare Press would make more sense. EmDash is at best a
| temporary meme.
| lavela wrote:
| Could you say a few things on your plans to develop the
| community and ecosystem then as requested?
|
| That's the significant part of Wordpress after all, not the
| mediocre code.
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| What does "While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress
| functionality" mean?
|
| Compatible how?
| fragmede wrote:
| Picking April First to launch is certainly a Decision.
| capitanazo77 wrote:
| Great job! I'll move to this if it has:
|
| - good caching - GUI in spanish - a cli like wp-cli
|
| good cache control is essential for news sites with 100k +
| posts
| jijji wrote:
| I agree with you, if you're already a competent engineer,
| your productivity only is improved by orders of magnitude by
| using coding agents that are at this point producing very
| good code as long as you give it the right prompts and you
| test your code and remove any bugs... if the code tests and
| all the bugs are removed, what you've got is a working
| product that is hard to argue that it doesn't work especially
| if there's been a lot of QA done on it and there's no
| bugs....
| mkl wrote:
| Does Cloudflare use EmDash in production? Showing that its
| design and implementation have been refined through real-
| world use would help instil confidence.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| Coded with AI != slop. AI in the hands of the right person can
| actually be good. That's gotten _especially_ true in the past
| few months.
| cataflutter wrote:
| Maybe what the parent commenter was referring to is that
| recently CloudFlare have published multiple vibe-code demo
| blog posts whilst trying to pass it off as production grade,
| for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516
| where they implemented an open standard communication
| protocol on CloudFlare Workers.
|
| The blog post was chock full of factual errors, claimed to be
| based off project X but wasn't at all and even had the cheek
| to include that it was arguably the most secure way to deploy
| such a server, with their implementation apparently already
| being used by their team to serve real traffic. Meanwhile the
| repo was full of TODOs for all the security aspects of the
| protocol.
|
| Of course after the backlash a lot of this was covered up so
| look at the archives if you are curious.
|
| They have really done a disservice to themselves because
| their blog posts used to be excellent, but now I have to
| question whether it's another blogpost full of fakery like
| that one (and there was another since iirc). Given this blog
| post talks about reimplementing a popular project, it starts
| to give off the signs of being another one of these.
| Unfortunate if that's not the case
| QuantumGood wrote:
| CloudFlare announcements have caused them to lose credibility
| in this area.
| jijji wrote:
| whether people want to admit it or not, agent encoding is
| kind of the norm right now and I think the fear is the
| stories coming out of places like Block, Inc where they
| announced they fired 4,000 engineers a couple days ago
| because of what's the obvious truth today versus 6 months
| ago.... one expert software engineer can do the work of 20-40
| people, so why do we need so many people? it's a hard pill to
| swallow, it's easier to claim that agentic coding doesn't
| work or that the code is sloppy and it doesn't work when in
| reality most companies are currently using it everyday,
| especially the large ones.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| IMO, what matters is whether it's coded _with_ AI or it 's
| coded _by_ AI.
|
| Is AI merely being used as a tool to aid the engineer?
| Because that's what I do. I use it as essentially a super-
| autocomplete. It typically only writes a couple lines at a
| time for me. On rare occasions, I can write a function
| signature and let it fill out the body. That's coding _with_
| AI.
|
| Anything more than that though? You're stepping into coding
| _by_ AI, which utterly fails at anything beyond an MVP. Once
| you go over 2,000 lines of code or so, it falls apart. It can
| 't reason about anything with even a small amount of
| complexity, and every "bug fix" either fails to fix the bug
| or it introduces two more.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I mean the name is a nod to that.
| madrox wrote:
| I'm getting so exhausted of the "slop" accusation on new
| project launches. There are legit criticisms of EmDash in the
| parent comment that are overshadowed by the implication it was
| AI coded and, thus, unusable quality.
|
| The problem is there's no beating the slop allegation. There's
| no "proof of work" that can be demonstrated in this comment
| section that satisfies, which you can see if you just keep
| following the entire chain. I'd rather read slop comments than
| this.
|
| The main engineer of this project is in the comments and all
| he's being engaged with on is the definition of vibes.
| notahacker wrote:
| They called the project EmDash and launched it on April 1st
| with a blog which brags about how little effort it took to
| write because of agents before even saying what it _is_.
|
| If the product launch involves dressing the engineering team
| up in duck suits and releasing to a soundtrack of quacking,
| it's really not surprising people are asking the guy they hid
| behind the Daffy mask on why he's dressed as a duck rather
| than what he learned about headless CMS architecture from
| being on the Astro core team...
| moffers wrote:
| I think Cloudflare has picked up that code velocity is only
| good if you can recruit users to a new open project, and have
| solid maintainers to keep the project going long term. Just
| from passive observance it feel like Cloudflare's engineering
| team is chockful of seasoned maintainers. They then have a
| great social following already. So, code velocity, plus
| audience, plus maintainers, means you maybe can capture a lot
| of open projects under your umbrella while people are still
| trying to figure out how to fiddle with legacy software and AI.
| Meanwhile, "new is always better" puts pressure on legacy user
| bases. Finally, you allow these things to hook into your
| magnanimous global app development platform, and boom you have
| got it made in the shade.
| cluckindan wrote:
| It's definitely slop of some kind.
| capabilities: ["read:content", "email:send"],
|
| Why mixed "permission:scope" and "scope:permission"?
| symisc_devel wrote:
| It is 100% vibe coded.
| cush wrote:
| This is such a valid concern. At this point I wouldn't adopt
| new features unless they've been actively maintained and stable
| for 6 months. Too risky.
| heipei wrote:
| Serious question: Who actually builds stuff on Cloudflare
| workers? I mean large software projects / services, and not just
| side projects where the ability to scale-to-zero is perhaps more
| important than the scale-to-infinity direction. I feel like
| Cloudflare keeps pushing workers with its full force yet I fail
| to see the appeal.
| odie5533 wrote:
| It's always seemed like a solution looking for a problem.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm building a commercial SaaS product on Workers. Although
| I've barely scratched the surface of what Cloudflare offers1,
| so far it's been great. The value proposition is effectively
| the same as serverless in general: You worry about the product,
| they worry about deployment. Note that Cloudflare Workers is
| just one (albeit important) star in their constellation of
| capabilities.
|
| 1https://developers.cloudflare.com/directory/?product-
| group=D...
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Me. I used to deploy everything via Docker swarm but recently
| migrated everything to workers because wrangler is awesome, it
| makes blue/green very simple, and it's a lot less of a headache
| for me to maintain in general. It's a great/flexible product. I
| also use R1/R2 pretty extensively.
| lioeters wrote:
| Cloudflare Workers solves their "scaling the price to infinity"
| problem.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Anything built in Svelte can be deployed to workers easily, and
| it's a very good platform.
|
| Just missing compartmentalisation features between prod and dev
| environments.
| doright wrote:
| I dunno, with the constant firehose of debate and disdain for AI
| this is a joke I'm too burned out about to feel like laughing at.
| jdurban wrote:
| the plugin security problem in WordPress was never really a code
| quality problem - it was a trust model problem. any developer
| could publish a plugin and any site owner could install it with
| one click, with no vetting layer in between. TypeScript and
| serverless doesn't change that dynamic unless the trust model
| changes too. curious how EmDash handles third-party plugin
| permissions at the API boundary.
| ascorbic wrote:
| It runs each sandboxed plugin inside its own dynamic worker,
| with a separate bridge worker to enforce permissions. The
| worker only has access to its permitted APIs.
| jdurban wrote:
| the bridge worker as permission enforcement is a solid
| pattern - the plugin can't escalate by calling APIs directly,
| everything goes through the bridge. the edge case I'd be
| curious about is plugin-to-plugin interaction. if two plugins
| share state through a permitted API, does the bridge enforce
| granular enough boundaries there, or does the trust model
| flatten at that layer?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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. Ask AI to write your app in
| Go, it'll happily comply. Run it and it's faster with less memory
| use and disk space. The code is simpler and smaller making
| reviewing easier. Distribution is as easy as "copy the file".
|
| I'll grant you, interpreted languages skip the "portability"
| compiling/distributing step, and let you avoid the stupid MacOS
| code signing. But Go is stupid easy to cross-compile, and
| (afaik?) the user can un-quarantine a self-signed app pretty
| easily.
| nikcub wrote:
| a) llms are good at writing typescript
|
| b) typescript fixed a lot about javascript and is somewhat
| decent
|
| c) multiple fast and performant runtime engines
|
| d) deployment story is php levels of easy
|
| that's it.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Do LLM's not benefit from the abstractions higher level
| languages like Javascript/node offer?
|
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You can implement apps in any popular language you want with
| modern LLMs (they still need to be trained on that language).
| Tell it what to write and it'll do it. But the downside is,
| if the language is a memory hog or takes up tons of disk
| space, you're not gaining anything. If you don't have to
| manually write the code yourself, you might as well pick a
| language that has the fewest problems when executed.
|
| Go has a really solid standard library which removes a lot of
| what you'd typically implement separately. You don't solve
| lower level problems because the language already solved it.
| Nodejs has the opposite issue, where there's virtually
| nothing standard, so people made libraries to implement 5
| lines of code. Rust also has a minimal standard library, and
| is more complex than Go. If you want a dead-simple,
| batteries-included compiled programming language, Go is
| pretty much it. Since you write less code with Go, there's
| less context use, so actually, the LLM has an easier time
| with Go apps.
|
| It started as a 'systems language' but it has many projects
| that extend its usefulness. There are two separate frameworks
| that let you write one Go app and compile it as an Android
| app, iOS app, Mac app, Windows app, Linux app, both GUI and
| console. It has multiple web frameworks, and one is even an
| Electron replacement. The thing it doesn't have is a REPL.
| dbbk wrote:
| Like it or not, it's the only language that'll cross over web
| backend, web frontend, iOS, Android, TV, Windows, Mac, et al.
| And with something like tRPC your data being fully end-to-end
| typesafe too.
| theLiminator wrote:
| Yeah, my theory is that Rust is going to be a somewhat "local
| optima" for a while for LLMs.
|
| LLMs have a couple major problem, they hallucinate and make
| mistakes. So the ideal way to use them is to constrain them as
| much as possible with formal methods. Rust's type system is a
| formal proof of some forms of correctness, this will let "vibe-
| coding" work to a much higher degree than with other languages.
|
| In the very long run, I suspect that all vibe-coding will
| actually occur in a language with dependent types and we'll
| push as much as possible into being proven correct at compile-
| time. Since the cost of generating code is plummeting, and thus
| the sheer volume of code will be exponentially rising, this is
| the only way to prevent an unsurmountable mountain of errors.
|
| Formal methods and LLMs are a match made in heaven.
| znort_ wrote:
| > with real languages now.
|
| how is javascript not a real language?
|
| > There's no reason to use an interpreted
|
| there are loads and loads of reasons to use "interpreted"
| languages. that you can't think of even a single one while
| still pretending to be knowledgeable in the field is really
| intriguing.
|
| > bloated, weird language
|
| oh, i see, this is all just a religious rant. carry on!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Typescript is legitimately weird. You start off with
| Javascript, a language made to validate HTML forms. Then you
| implement a bytecode compiler so it's not unusably slow and
| buggy. Then you implement "frameworks" to try to make it
| create real applications across the insane platform that is
| the web browser. After twisting yourself into a pretzel just
| to avoid learning or making a new language, you finally
| invent another language on top of the first one just so you
| can have types. To top it all off, it takes up tons of memory
| and disk space. (I don't mention the slowness because I take
| it for granted, but 5x-10x slower than Go code is still worth
| considering)
| dgb23 wrote:
| The problem with Go specifically is that it's not great for
| processing arbitrary JSON and especially not your typical
| frontend code.
|
| One issue is that you don't write Go code, you write Go plus
| some templating language (like html/template or go templ). Not
| being able to seamlessly move from regular code and template
| code adds friction and is limiting while developing, figuring
| stuff out and iterating.
|
| Another problem is that the type system is often not expressive
| enough for frontend code. So you either have to generate types
| or end up with something like map[string]any, which is awkward
| and gives you less guarantees and support than what dynamic
| languages typically offer (in other words, dynamic languages
| are better at being dynamic languages than Go).
|
| Now these problems don't emerge in every web UI based project,
| but when they do, it's really painful and limiting compared to
| what one is used to.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Spiritually bankrupt, that should just be considered marketing
| material.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| deployed it on vercel for lolz - it works!
| mrbonner wrote:
| I am not sure if this is an April fool joke anymore in the age of
| AI.
| hnismad wrote:
| EmDash on Apr 1 come on guys
| Meneth wrote:
| "solve security" - that's an April Fools joke if I ever heard
| one.
| reddalo wrote:
| Given how shitty it looks and behaves, I was 100% sure this was
| an April Fools. But after reading the serious comments here on
| HN, I'm not sure anymore...
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| You can certainly solve WordPress well-known security issues by
| dropping WordPress, hard to argue with that.
| rafark wrote:
| Will you look at it. Another Wordpress "killer". Wordpress has
| that market share because it can be easily installed in a wide
| variety of servers and because of its plugin ecosystem of dozens
| of thousands of plugins and huge flexibility/customizability.
| Wordpress is one of the most flexible pieces of software out
| there and none of the competition seem to get why Wordpress is so
| popular.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| From the people who brought you "we used AI to undercut a project
| we use rather than pay them fairly for the work we relied on"
| comes an exciting new lawsuit by Mullenweg for using Wordpress in
| their product description.
| sam345 wrote:
| I for one am glad that WordPress has some competition. This
| sounds like a killer rewrite.
| delfinom wrote:
| Is this just literally turning plugins into microservices? Lol
| delbronski wrote:
| Ha! Nice April Fools joke. Nothing will succeed WordPress. Not
| even AGI. Specially not something with the name EmDash. Good one
| Cloudflare.
| Jaco07 wrote:
| Spiritually hollow; at this point, it reads more like marketing
| material than anything of genuine substance.
| tkel wrote:
| Yeah, they are churning out these AI slop projects for blogpost
| hits about once a week now
| hackerbeat wrote:
| Thanks, but I'll stick to WordPress.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| 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 were you recommending to non-technical friends and
| family who wanted a good, open source, affordable CMS to back
| their website? Wordpress has all the right _ideas_, but the wrong
| implementation.
| voganmother42 wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| Throw in the the bragging about slop and cleanroom clones to
| avoid AGPL, the name and April 1st launch date, and maybe the
| high priority afforded to agent-friendly crypto payment
| infrastructure if anyone was paying attention. Maybe they
| prompted the marketing agent with "how can you get HN to
| loathe a product as innocuous as an open source headless
| CMS?"
|
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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 devs to commit to your marketplace and lock
| customers in.
|
| Wordpress is awful. The _only_ thing it 's got going is its
| moat, but that's not an engineering problem, but a people
| problem instead.
| MrFurious wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that people used to WordPress, with
| its flaws and virtues(yes, wordpress have virtues), will
| switch to this, no matter how much it's from Cloudflare.
| rednafi wrote:
| It's great that they are recreating much of the fundamental
| software stack using LLMs. But if you're going to 'vibeslop,' at
| least do it in a language other than JavaScript.
|
| I struggle to understand why anyone would want to generate code
| in TypeScript - unless what you're building truly can't be done
| in Go, Rust, or Kotlin; anything but JS.
|
| I'm not sure how much of an improvement it really is to rewrite
| something from PHP to TypeScript while claiming security
| benefits.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| I mean it's cool your created a new CMS and all, but beyond the
| look of the admin interface and publishing flow, I don't see how
| this is a "Spirtual Successor" to WordPress at all.
|
| Its a CMS, designed from scratch, for a serverless world. It has
| a stricter, well defined API that plugins are forced to use
| instead of directly calling/overriding core functionality like in
| WP. But that benefit comes with a CMS that's built on top of, and
| seems to prefer, a ton of CF proprietary capabilities (D1
| Databases, R2 for image/media storage, their workers for running
| things).
|
| The web need less consolidation on CF, not more.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Its a CMS, designed from scratch..._
|
| Maybe not _scratch_ scratch: "And under the hood, EmDash is
| powered by Astro..."
|
| > _It 's built on top of, and seems to perfer you use CF
| proprietary capabilities (D1 Databases, R2 for image/media
| storage, their workers for running things._
|
| D1 is SQLite, R2 is S3, and there are other ways to securely
| run plugins. If it was designed to _only_ be possible to deploy
| on Cloudflare, they didn 't do a very good job.
| rationalist wrote:
| Why would I want to publish my writing online when it can just be
| copied by an AI?
| layer8 wrote:
| "EmDash" sounds like it will also generate the writing.
| hyperionultra wrote:
| Wordpress is PHP, which has developer base insanely larger then
| typescript. Also, a lot cheaper. Compete with that.
| skybrian wrote:
| Coding agents make this much less important.
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Your first statement is wildly and verifiably untrue (see:
| https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-
| popular...) and your second statement doesn't make sense. I've
| got like 8 sites on Pages/Workers with R1 + vectorize databases
| scattered around and I'm not paying a dime for any of that.
| What cost are you talking about?
| steveharing1 wrote:
| Lately Cloudflare is trying to create alternatives to big ones,
| like first Vercel & now Wordpress.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I don't like that they see the main selling point that the
| license, is not GPL, and that plugins don't have to license it
| that way either. I understand that not all developers are
| comfortable with the GPL license, but it allows to the code
| continue to be open source and that most plugins are open source
| also
| benatkin wrote:
| A big issue with WordPress is the GPL. There hasn't been much
| clarity about it and the interpretations I've heard from
| Automattic in regard to which code is and is not covered by the
| GPL come from Automattic, not from the GPL.
| https://redsweater.com/blog/825/getting-pretty-lonely
| camillomiller wrote:
| Lol, build the same level of community first, then we'll talk
| eis wrote:
| After all the AI slop from Cloudflare in recent months and the
| embarrassment that came with it, they dare to launch this vibe
| coded project with THAT name on April 1st? I'm really not sure
| what to think anymore. Reality became too absurd.
| devmor wrote:
| You want a spiritual successor? We have Ghost.
|
| You want anything beyond ghost? Find a way to port the vast
| market of 100,000+ cheap and free themes and components that are
| available to enable tech-illiterate, low-budget users to
| basically build an entire business platform on a $5/mo shared
| hosting plan.
|
| A vibe coded CMS that's 3 months in the making is not capable of
| taking that place in the market, no matter how much VC funding
| you put behind it.
| bluewavescrash wrote:
| Curious about the architectural choice: Why not build it as a
| pure headless CMS separate from Astro, and then ship an Astro
| adapter alongside it?
| t1234s wrote:
| I think wordpress, woo commerce and elementor are in a Mexican
| standoff. Wordpress cant fork or change in a major way because
| the other two are so popular no one would use the new variant.
| woo commercere and elementor can't just walk away and make their
| own wordpress-less platform because they rely on each other and
| the other constellation of plugins that run on wordpress.
| chuckadams wrote:
| WooCommerce is owned by the same company as Wordpress.
| Elementor is just one page builder of many in the vast
| ecosystem you mention, but much of that ecosystem can be
| ported. As replacing the core CMS goes, Emdash might be able to
| conquer, but time will tell as to whether it's able to rule.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > But for the past two months our agents have been working on an
| even more ambitious project: rebuilding the WordPress open source
| project from the ground up.
|
| > no WordPress code was used to create EmDash
|
| Hm. Do you think those agents were trained on WP code?
| foopod wrote:
| As a (unfortunately) wordpress dev this seems to solve my single
| biggest painpoint with WP. Which isn't plugin security, but the
| overall plugin architecture.
|
| WP treats plugins as content, literally in the same top level
| `wp-content` directory as uploaded images. This makes CI/CD among
| other things, a nightmare. But EmDash plugins are just TS
| modules, which has got to make things easier even if plugin
| configuration does end up in the db somewhere.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wordpress has no concept of a "staging site" and no way to make
| changed and then "export" them from dev to production; you
| basically have to either restore it as a backup or just replay
| the changes by hand.
| capitanazo77 wrote:
| Name it CloudPress
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| 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.
| earthlingdavey wrote:
| Why not a templating language, like Nunjucks EJS or JSX, with
| vanilla JS for interactivity?
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| 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).
| earthlingdavey wrote:
| 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 nunjucks has 3.
|
| I'm weary of updates, maybe it's just me, but I doubt it.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| The lede everyone is burying: "Every EmDash site has x402 support
| built in -- charge for access to content"
| earthlingdavey wrote:
| This is very interesting. I've worked with WordPress on and off
| for 10 years, and I'm convinced that this project has got 2
| things absolutely spot on. TypeScript and Worker plugins.
|
| I've given the security, or lack of, WP a lot of thought
| recently. In WP malicious plugin has access to the database,
| enfironment variables, rendering text on screen (think XSS).
| Luckily, a thoughtfully designed plugin system can mitigate all
| of those issues.
|
| I've been working on a headless CMS in my spare time that is
| eirily similar to EmDash in a few ways. It's in very early
| development, but I will share regardless. It's called HotsauceCMS
| - https://github.com/hotsauce-team/hotsauce
|
| - I went with optional NodeJS or Deno Worker plugins, this means
| that first-party plugins can benefit from the speed of in-
| process, and other plugins can be run in Workers. For fine
| grained permission control, you can use Deno Workers.
|
| - I went with absolute minimal dependencies, I am so fed up with
| Dependabot alerts and npm supply chain hacks. My CMS has only 4
| dependencies, 0 transistive dependencies.
|
| - It's Drizzle schema first, and headless. So you have full
| controll of the database structure, use cms hints in your schema
| for features like file upload.
|
| - It's database-agnostic, so it works with any Drizzle-supported
| database (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite)
|
| - Being headless, you can use any frontend, my preference is JSX
| w/o react, but anything goes.
|
| Feedback is absolutely welcomed on HotsauceCMS, did I miss a
| trick, am I on the right track?
|
| Anyway, congratulations on EmDash. I'll be following closely,
| excited to see how the next few months unfold.
| mi_lk wrote:
| > I'm convinced that this project has got 2 things absolutely
| spot on. TypeScript and Worker plugins.
|
| Can you explain why TS is spot on?
| earthlingdavey wrote:
| The main thing is unified types.
|
| - I've been done GraphQL server with a build step to share
| types between languages.
|
| - I've used untyped JS client side code.
|
| Both are prone to bugs, and not much fun.
|
| TS for front and back end: sharing types means you'll have
| editor type hints, catch type errors at lint (or build), and
| you might even share validation logic between client and
| browser.
| abimaelmartell wrote:
| I used to work with Wordpress a lot, but last time was a couple
| years ago.
|
| The appeal for the company i was working with was ease of
| installation on legacy servers (FTP). You would just upload the
| files, and it worked. No CLI tools, no dependency management,
| no build tools.
|
| But yeah, security was a big issue. Constant hacks.
| omnimus wrote:
| The constant hacks are side effect of Wordpress popularity.
| Every discovered security flaw is exploited by bots almost
| immediately. Unless you keep up with the updates you are very
| vulnerable. It is not because wordpress is built on "legacy"
| stack. Other CMSes on that stack (and many are very popular)
| don't have this problem.
| lucasay wrote:
| Cool idea, especially the plugin security angle, but WordPress's
| real strength is its ecosystem. That's going to be hard to
| replicate.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| No thanks, I hate it.
|
| (To be clear, I'm no fan of WordPress either, and its security
| hassles are a real issue. But some sloppified MegaCorp vibecoded
| fever dream will _never_ be a suitable replacement, of that I
| guarantee.)
| fragmede wrote:
| Is that based on anything concrete or are you just going off of
| vibes for that?
| sublinear wrote:
| Why?!
|
| Half the websites on wordpress moved to shopify, squarespace,
| etc. a very long time ago. The remaining half were blogs,
| personal pages, wikis, etc. that moved to community/social
| platforms created in the past decade(s). In a few cases out of
| all this someone finally learned how to write/host a webpage
| themselves (imagine that)! It's even easier with AI now.
|
| I'm totally serious when I ask "why". Who actually uses a CMS or
| anything like that anymore? It's madness!
| dminik wrote:
| I can't believe as developers we were worried about AI training
| on licensed code. It turns out it didn't matter at all. You can
| just point an LLM at some source code and you're off scot-free.
| dbbk wrote:
| Almost all apps are just CRUD. The code is not that
| interesting. The valuable IP is the product.
| hessammehr wrote:
| Ine thing no other CMS tends to get right (for my needs) is
| Gutenberg. Tiptap, mantine etc.are just no substitute and for
| someone like me with next to no frontend knowledge Gutenberg was
| the only option that provided the flexibility and good defaults
| to keep a decent looking website that my students could also post
| on with no training.
|
| 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| This reminds me of Linus Torvalds about Git, criticizing that SVN
| did present itself as "CVS done right" for... _" It's impossible
| to get CVS right"_. Which I found incredibly funny and witty.
|
| Is the second coming of Wordpress what we really need?
| inklesspen wrote:
| So it's a WordPress successor that doesn't support any WordPress
| plugins (since they're written in PHP and this is written in
| TypeScript) and has baked-in support for blockchain payments. and
| also it's "AI Native", because the internet definitely needs more
| AI slop blogs.
|
| This IS an April Fools joke, whether or not they intended it to
| be one.
| mmaunder wrote:
| The generous take is that this is someone's pet project that
| marketing got too excited about, and that the leadership haven't
| applied their minds to. GPL provides a moat for the community,
| who are contributing their time and energy into a project. It
| ensures that, even if a commercial company grabs your software,
| extends it, and commercializes it, that you can fold those
| improvements back into your original distribution. While the
| commercial entity benefits from your free labor, you benefit back
| from theirs.
|
| Re-implementing WordPress (their words, not mine) as MIT
| licensed, while legally questionable, breaks that virtuous cycle
| and removes the community's moat. They've taken WordPress's roles
| and menus and borrowed its Gutenberg code (which is GPL), and
| launched it as an MIT licensed product, which breaks that
| virtuous cycle. It means e.g. a hosting company can take the
| product closed source if they want to, and never have to
| contribute any of what they build on top of the community's work,
| back to the community.
|
| https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/tree/main/packages/core...
| says "The core EmDash CMS package - an Astro-native, agent-
| portable reimplementation of WordPress."
|
| Emdash uses WP's RBAC roles. Also uses their menus. Also depends
| on @wordpress/block-serialization-default-parser which I think
| might (??) be able to be used by an MIT project even though
| WordPress is GPL.
|
| They used Claude Code it seems because the first commit has a
| CLAUDE.md file which became an AGENTS.md.
| midtake wrote:
| EmDash is a stupid name
| amanzi wrote:
| So this is just a "similar" CMS to WordPress in that it has
| themes and plugins, and you can publish pages, posts, tags,
| categories, etc. But there are lots of similar CMS out there, and
| this one isn't "compatible" with WordPress since you obviously
| can't just take a WordPress theme or plugin and install it in
| your EmDash site. So I don't even know why the focus on WordPress
| here - this is just yet another CMS that offers similar features.
| ajbourg wrote:
| I have long wanted a static blog with a backend content manager
| that runs serverless. Love seeing this, but we will see if
| Cloudflare maintains it in the long run.
| dirkc wrote:
| The thing that has always stood out to me about WordPress, is
| that you can get a site up without any of the usual technical
| steps I associate with creating a site, but still have access to
| the innards of the site. Does it often go wrong, sure, but it is
| a lot more approachable for less technical users.
|
| In contrast, typical web frameworks (even static sites) require a
| code change, build, deploy, etc to update many aspects of a site.
| Venn1 wrote:
| If I could smash a button and get a 1:1 copy of my existing site,
| I'd do it in a heartbeat. I don't see that happening just yet due
| to the integrated forum software and its own plugins.
|
| With Cloudflare behind it, hopefully plugin vendors will start
| paying attention.
| mmaunder wrote:
| If creating OSS is this low effort, the right question is: What
| high effort assets, that are valuable to other builders, should
| open communities be working on? And I think the answer is open
| source models with open training and open training data.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| This is really buggy and janky... try it in mobile, the
| navigation doesn't even work. UX elements move around the place
| when you hover or click them.
| kneel25 wrote:
| There's something so nasty about just replicating the whole scope
| in one pass so poorly instead of getting one thing right and
| proving potential. braindead UI scattered around they don't even
| know about or can't be arsed to prompt fix, they just dump that
| shit directly onto you.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Does it bother anyone else that the capability tags in their
| example seem to follow different noun:verb conventions?
| capabilities: ["read:content", "email:send"],
| rcarr wrote:
| In my opinion, Cloudflare are coming at this from the wrong
| angle. WordPress is so popular because back in the day it was the
| easiest way to get a website built. So it got a network effect of
| engineers behind it which is why it persists at 40% of websites
| today. Same thing happened with React - majority of Typescript
| sites are written in React and NextJS because of the network
| effect around it.
|
| Yeah the security aspect is important, but how many of those
| Wordpress engineers are going to jump ship to this because of
| security when they've been fine with the risk so far? My money is
| not a lot. If someone is a WordPress dev in 2026, they're
| probably not the type of dev that likes to upskill and learn new
| tech. Similarly, if you're looking to target the average joe
| looking to build a fresh website, would that consumer really
| choose this over Wix or Squarespace? It doesn't look easier to
| use so I wouldn't count on it. So where is the network effect
| going to come from to make this the new WordPress?
|
| I could see Vinext being successful if they keep at it-- I think
| there are a sizeable amount of people who would like to move away
| from Vercel (and who will probably migrate to Tanstack when the
| ecosystem is more stable). But I'm not sure people on WordPress
| really want to leave. If they really want to make this successful
| I think they need a better angle which in my opinion would be
| making it easier, quicker, cheaper and more flexible than
| Squarespace/Wix/Shopify etc
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