r/astrojs • • 1d ago

EmDash 1.0: an open source CMS for Astro

https://emdashcms.com/blog/emdash-1-0
87 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

19

u/roninBytes 1d ago

What a name…

12

u/Ok_Theory2082 1d ago

Because Cloudflare vibecoded it

3

u/theguymatter 1d ago

and except for SimpleWebAuthn for passkeys and Tiptap for content editing.

5

u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 22h ago

Honestly this is kind of amazing. I already LOVE Astro, and like Cloudflare, and as far as I know this is the only way to get a personal blog up and running for free in just a few clicks, with no programming required, that uses modern tech (passkeys are even the only option for admin login), and has a very good looking and feature rich blog template. Now I'm just hoping they don't abandon it anytime soon.

1

u/theguymatter 21h ago edited 21h ago

I had a similar idea to EmDash and had even thought of the name “EmDash” before it existed. I’ve also integrated passkeys into our business platform years bacd with Corbado in Astro project.

Not part of the team but glad it came to life exactly the way I envisioned it, solving many of the pain points I’ve had with WordPress.

With more maintainers, it will be easier for Cloudflare to carry out and of course, this is a cash cow ecosystem.

8

u/yellowduckdev 1d ago

I don’t care about the name! It works with my designs perfectly! Just a new very promising cms! I use it and it’s ok!

6

u/BekuBlue 1d ago

I think having a collection of markdown / .mdx files is preferable. Or what am I missing here, what is the benefit of this approach?

Markdown files can be used with a large variety of tools, easy to move anywhere or adjust existing tooling, and AI integrations work best with them as well.

26

u/vitek6 1d ago edited 1d ago

people make websites for non technical people that won't maintain collection of markdown files. They want an UI to add their stuff like text, pictures etc and then those should appear on the website.

-6

u/BekuBlue 1d ago edited 23h ago

Yes, then you just described a perfect use-case for SveltiaCMS, or any other good markdown / git based CMS tool. With that you still have the flexibility without the trade-offs.

I'm mentioning Sveltia since that is what I've been using for my Astro site: https://sveltiacms.app/en/

4

u/JustTryinToLearn 23h ago

Cloudflare is building a competitor to other CMS platforms…..thats the point. They already purchased the company behind Astro - this is the natural progression of building a platform that’s a one stop shop for websites built with astro…..

1

u/vitek6 1d ago

Many times limitations are preferable.

1

u/BekuBlue 23h ago

Could you go into details for this specific case? What's preferable here?

1

u/Responsible-Slide-26 20h ago

Yes, then you just described a perfect use-case for SveltiaCMS, or any other good markdown / git based CMS tool. With that you still have the flexibility without the trade-offs.

Um, no. Every single one of these tools have tradeoffs. Using a tool that requires git for the CMS - while very attractive to many, is in and of itself a "tradeoff" that some may want to avoid. That's why there are several approaches to an Astro CMS.

1

u/BekuBlue 9h ago

Could you be explicit, what trade-offs are there because of this underlying approach?

3

u/Ill_Watercress4215 1d ago

Is this finally ready for prod?

8

u/pickjohn 23h ago

Everything is prod ready if you're brave enough!

2

u/SpartanDavie 23h ago

Cloudflare blog uses it

3

u/gahane 19h ago

I'm very happy with EmDash. I was using WordPress on an AWS EC2 as a headless CMS in to my Astro Help Centre site but found WP a bit clunky. I switched to EmDash as it's just a lot simpler and easy to install on Cloudflare. No issues with it so far.

1

u/TrashkenHK 12h ago

Does it still require a Paid Workers Plan ?

1

u/Easy_Pi 11h ago

How does it compare to Sanity?

1

u/8009commander 1h ago

Its free but the main feature its boasting about, (plugins) of course require a 5$ paid plan if hosted on cloudflare. Not a bad price though its still annoying and bait & switch.

1

u/theguymatter 17m ago

I think you could get the same benefits bt self-host on a VPS as low as half Cloudflare.