EmDash: New Plugin Opportunity or Threat? YouTube video by WP Product Talk

In a bit over an hour, @tk.gg and I will be live on WP Product Talk, chatting about EmDash. Come and watch!

96% of WordPress security issues come from plugins.
EmDash, a new CMS built on Astro, runs plugins in sandboxed Worker isolates instead.
Matt “TK” Taylor and Matt Kane explain how it works.

Full episode + subscribe →
https://ThisWeekinNET.com

Not the head of product at the bad site complaining that a feature that he uses all the time is being used against him in a dishonest way.

Gee, I wonder who has the data and capability to improve such a feature. 🤔

This is amazing: somebody has built the first hosting platform for EmDash. This is exactly what I hoped would happen. dashhost.io

When I launched EmDash I was utterly exhausted from two months of building mostly alone. The explosion of the new community is both daunting and energising. I am determined to turn this into a sustainable OSS community. Please join us if you want to create a better way to build content driven sites.

Matt has done something incredible with this, and all the success is completely deserved.

We've set up a discord for those who want to help out with the future of EmDash. You can join here: discord.gg/YY9vBaQRYt

let us know how it works for you!

Kinda feels like @emdashcms.com is going to beat Artemis II to the moon.

The effort needed to be certain it was safe to MIT license @emdashcms.com really drove home why it was important to MIT license it. For a lot of enterprises, GPL software is free only if your lawyers are free.

We both got these domains before we joined Cloudflare so... idk if you're looking for a job maybe consider it? Guernsey is a lovely place (I have never been).

One of us! One of us!

oh no what timing!

Fancy a second migration to a very beta piece of software? Give us some feedback? 😁

You can run it in node and there is a railway template from a community member already. Admittedly you are right that today the sandboxing only works on Cloudflare, but there are open source secure execution environments being built that we could support in the future. We're just early to market.

Why would it need to support the WordPress API? It has its own.

Love that completely random bsky people now block me because this project mentions AI a lot.

If the same lot engaged with a little slop they'd find an awful lot of cool stuff that wouldn't otherwise exist.

There's a lot wrong with AI x society, but cool web apps ain't it.

I'd absolutely love to hear your feedback Ben, let me know when you've had time to give it a try. It's very early days so the interface has a long way to go, but I think you'll be able to look past that at the vision.

uhhhhhhh.... maybe we did it already? 🫢github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/blob/m... cc @mk.gg

@mk.gg is best placed for his thinking on that

Thanks Ernie! I'd be super interested in your feedback and thoughts on where we need to go next to make this interesting for someone like you.

Haha, sorry! Cloudflare has a bit of a history of doing crazy (real) announcements on April 1st.

Give it a go, would love to hear your reaction given your experience!

I'm hoping that it at least beats others on ease of install.

Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security Today we are launching the beta of EmDash, a full-stack serverless JavaScript CMS built on Astro 6.0. It combines the features of a traditional CMS with modern security, running plugins in sandboxed W...

What would WordPress look like if you built it in 2026? Like this! Uses Astro of course. I've wanted to build something like this for years, and finally got the chance.

We have a skill in the repo for helping you to port themes, please do give it a go. We've found in our testing that at least for simple ones it seems to do very well.

We can't distribute any of those themes because of licensing.

I mean, I also have a four character domain name. 👀

It's a bit more fiddly, but that's where partners could possibly come in and build control planes that standardise and simplify some of that fiddliness.

As I'm sure you'll know, Themes are also a horrible attack vector for WordPress, and architecturally they are not sensible.

So we don't do hot swappable "themes" but you could port your content to a different Astro site with the same general components and it should work.

Oh and this is not an April Fools.

It's real, you can deploy it now, in <5 minutes.

Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security Today we are launching the beta of EmDash, a full-stack serverless JavaScript CMS built on Astro 6.0. It combines the features of a traditional CMS with modern security, running plugins in sandboxed W...

Crazy crazy day. My first Cloudflare blog, and it's a big one.

We're rebuilding WordPress as if it were built today. It's end to end TypeScript, works as an Astro plugin, and has secure plugin execution in dynamic workers.

It's called EmDash, try it now ⤵️

blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordp...

Screenshot of a Bluesky post by Steven Rich (@datab.ae) reading: "this is dope af. i hope it goes gangbusters."

Yesterday, three journalists created the first ever Bundle Pass with Trustfnd. It gives access for 30 days to all their publications.

People were excited. Here are some of our favorite reactions, framed.

It did go gangbusters, @datab.ae!

Can't believe my friend is all over the freaking timeline with newsletter bundling and some incredible creators. ❤️ So happy that these ideas he dreamed up are having an impact on people. A gem.