> 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.

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.

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."

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.

Sure, but if I want to host my static files on a website where they are easily cached... cloudflare also offers this product?

I am confused - what are the good “websites” roots? Server-side rendered or not?

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.

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.

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.

Reading this paragraph I was genuinely convinced it was an April 1st thing.

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