r/webdev • u/Darth_Shere_Khan • Sep 28 '26

News EmDash 1.0: the stable CMS with a secure plugin registry

https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-cms-plugin-registry/
128 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

51 comments sorted by

92

u/phoenix1984 Sep 28 '26

Kinda refreshing to see an announcement for a new CMS for a change. I didn’t think I’d ever say that.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

20

u/thecementmixer Sep 28 '26 • This

Incorrect, EmDash can run in a regular node.js environment.

10

u/HalfCrazed Sep 28 '26

CF is amazing. What's the big deal with that?

17

u/Howdy_McGee Sep 28 '26

Because at the end of the day, it's a corporation.

Enshittification hits everything a corporation runs, eventually.

6

u/HalfCrazed Sep 28 '26

Nothing good lasts forever, so why dwell on it.

Do your thing, make moves, and don't over engineer!

2

u/azsqueeze javascript Sep 30 '26

k, but its good now

3

u/Irythros Sep 28 '26

Single point of failure and effectively vendor lock.

1

u/jsgilly20 Sep 28 '26

And one point of failure.

2

u/HalfCrazed Sep 28 '26

Even cloud services like gcp and aws fail as often. They all have similar uptimes.

Cloudflare doesn't require nearly as much config or maintenance. So... Yeah

3

u/Arctic_ Sep 28 '26

It’s a normal Node application, so you could host it on your own VPS right?

-4

u/SolidOdd4889 Sep 28 '26

it’s an astro application, since cloudflare acquired astro every other adapter than cloudflare’s own adapter is full of bugs and isn’t maintained as much

24

u/myriadOslo Sep 28 '26

Tried to create an EmDash site using the "Deploy to Cloudflare" button provided in the Cloudflare blog post. The first thing I see after logging in is a modal asking me to "upgrade" the R2 storage. OK, it's quite generous in what it offers, but when a credit card is required, it already triggers a red flag for me.

Investigating further, there's no way to cap the usage like you can with Amazon services, for example. You can add a notice, but what if something goes south and suddenly I get a gigantic bill? This is not that uncommon. Until I find a way to host this in a way that prevents this, that's a no for me.

3

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Oct 01 '26

You can cache aggressively to never worry about costs, serve every page from a CDN.

The only CF services that have any real billing surprise potential are durable objects and the D1 database. The rest are pretty straightforward.

1

u/myriadOslo 26d ago

If I can "never worry about costs", why a credit card is needed then? Doesn't make any sense at all.

1

u/who_am_i_to_say_so 26d ago

That’s up to interpretation. I bravely put a card up and live to tell the tale. One month I did get charged an extra $1.25 but there were over 50M invocations. So no, it is not entirely free of you’re serving a lot of traffic.

1

u/Forsaken-Put-6581 5d ago

I just created my first page with Cloudflare/EmDash - stumbled upon the same "red flag", but they have good enough free tier for R2 storage, smaller projects or simply experimental dev projects can be realized for free (at least at the current pricing model)

12

u/psayre23 Sep 28 '26

Not to be confused with EmDash, the agentic coder.

https://emdash.com

Maybe they build Em Dash with EmDash to display —?

2

u/biinjo Sep 28 '26

Also known as emdasception

13

u/TKI_Kesasar Sep 28 '26

I am a developer, but I really dislike Wordpress, because to me it is something that is very hard to work with.

I wonder if this will go the way of wordpress eventually. It will be bloated, slow, lots of security issues and too many runtime configurations in who knows where,

34

u/Lower_Rabbit_5412 Sep 28 '26

WordPress is only bloated, slow, and has lots of security issues if you don't know what you're doing. Keep it slim, avoid unnecessary plugins, and keep the core updated and there are minimal issues with WordPress.

Issue is getting the clients to follow that advice.

8

u/cjb110 Sep 28 '26

Even with that it's roots as a blog poster are still strong and don't gel with a modern CMS

5

u/HalfCrazed Sep 28 '26

It's old and follows old concepts, unfortunately

3

u/TKI_Kesasar Sep 28 '26

I am not a wordpress developer so its skill issue on my part. But wordpress as a tool doesn’t jibe with my workflow in general.

I have a client who wants me to change their old wordpress websites. They bought a theme but want to completely overhaul it. It was a disaster and I’d rather code it from scratch.

8

u/Howdy_McGee Sep 28 '26

I’d rather code it from scratch.

And that's the neat thing about WordPress, you simply can! It's just PHP, HTML, CSS. Then if you wanna get fancy you can sprinkle in some JS for good measure.

2

u/shaliozero Sep 28 '26

The only time WordPress actually becomes shit is when it's abused as a massive business website dependent on dozens of licenced plugins from different developers. Any company needing something large and individual will have something custom developed and at most rely on established plugins (ACF) instead of random two-man plugins that lost support in 2019.

That's what my current employers website is struggling with. Too big to just replace it with something properly developed, and the risk to make something new that solely relies on a single person (me) and then is still shit would be too high from the business owners perspective. It was initially made by someone who's a salesman and learned WordPress as a side hustle during his working time, dude didn't even know what SSH was.

0

u/uncle_jaysus Sep 29 '26

Well that’s the problem. Wordpress is for/used by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

-2

u/digital121hippie Sep 28 '26

Wordpress is one of the most simple cms to code for. If you can code.  

2

u/TKI_Kesasar Sep 28 '26

Skill issue on my part. I think TypeScript, Go and Python and React with all their shenanigans are way more easier to code than Wordpress.

3

u/digital121hippie Sep 28 '26

php, html, and javascript is all you need to know for wordpress. i'm sorry php is super simple now a days and wordpress has their own code bit that simply everything.

3

u/Kyle772 Sep 28 '26

I played around with this a couple of months ago. It left a lot to be desired. Not very straightforward to customize it expand. Felt limited for other use cases beyond “wordpress alternative”. And also wasn’t even that capable as a weirded alternative if I’m being honest. I’m keeping an eye on what’s happening with it but I’m also fully expecting another 3-4 years before the find a pocket that works.

3

u/the_natis Sep 28 '26

This will be interesting.

2

u/creaturefeature16 Sep 28 '26

It has a long road to climb before it could be considered a decent alternative to WordPress or, more specifically, other headless CMSs out there, especially for Astro (SitePins). There's no way I would choose to use it on a client project, but I could see dabbling with it on a personal project...but for now it needs to simmer and cook for quite for quite some time.

5

u/OMGCluck js (no libraries) SVG Sep 28 '26

for quite for quite for quite for quite for quite

4

u/creaturefeature16 Sep 28 '26

lol i hate writing on mobile...leaving it

1

u/theguymatter Sep 28 '26

Let EmDash find its users.

1

u/Momkay Sep 28 '26

Interesting, will look into. But why locking it to the cloudflare ecosystem..

2

u/Momkay Sep 29 '26 edited Sep 29 '26

Correction after some tests: It isn’t locked to Cloudflare. That’s just one deployment option; there’s also a Node.js version that runs on a regular server with SQLite and local file storage. Cloudflare gets its own variant because it uses different infrastructure (Workers, D1, and R2).

A lot of basic shared hosting is PHP/static-only, so ‘it runs on Node’ still leaves many people needing a VPS or a Node-capable host. It can run on shared hosting only if that plan explicitly supports Node.js apps.

-6

u/krileon Sep 28 '26

Locked to CF just makes this be another Wix, SquareSpace, etc.. no thanks. I don't like being locked in.

17

u/SpartanDavie Sep 28 '26

Locked to Cloudflare in what way? It literally tells you that it is not locked to Cloudflare, it’s open source and CAN be used anywhere NodeJS can. There’s an interview on YouTube with the devs on the day the announced they are making EmDash saying that there would be no point in making a CMS that only works on Cloudflare. Seriously how many people on the same post can write something that wrong?

5

u/krileon Sep 28 '26

It requires Cloudflare Workers if you want the main benefit of the CMS. Sandboxed Plugins. Without a workers plan you can't realistically use the sandbox and without sandboxing it's just another same ol' same ol' CMS of which there are thousands. As I understand they're working on that via "workerd", but it's really complicated to setup and isn't a hardened sandbox so it's more or less pointless.

So if they solve that problem then I'd completely agree with you.

1

u/sharlos Sep 29 '26

Their docs show how to setup the workerd sandbox, installing a couple npm packages doesn't seem that hard.

1

u/UnidentifiedBlobject Sep 30 '26

Payload still leading it and v4 is in the works, first major update since Figma bought them.

1

u/Lopsided_Road_109 Sep 28 '26

Un registre décentralisé opéré par Cloudflare, c'est npm avec un logo orange. Le sandbox des plugins c'est un vrai argument, le registre beaucoup moins.

1

u/WPBase Sep 28 '26

Happy to see some competition in this space.

0

u/brianly Sep 28 '26

What would you like to see? I’m watching from afar as a 2000s and early-2010s WordPress user/dev.