EmDash: Could Cloudflare's New CMS Be the WordPress Successor We Have Been Waiting For?
On 1st April 2026, Cloudflare dropped something that made the entire WordPress world sit up and take notice. EmDash is a brand new, open-source content management system built entirely in TypeScript, and Cloudflare are calling it the "spiritual successor to WordPress." That is a bold claim. But after spending time with it ourselves, we think they might actually be onto something.
At Forty Miles West, we have been building with WordPress for years. It has been the backbone of almost every client project we have delivered. We know it inside and out, and we are grateful for what it has given us. But we are also honest about its shortcomings, and there are plenty of them. WordPress is nearly 24 years old. The web has changed beyond recognition since it was first released, and in many ways, WordPress has struggled to keep up.
The Problems We Live With Every Day
If you run a WordPress agency, you already know the pain points. Plugins are expensive. Premium plugins like Advanced Custom Fields Pro, WP Rocket, Gravity Forms, and countless others add up fast, and those costs get passed on to clients or eaten by the agency. Worse still, you are relying on third-party developers to maintain, update, and add features to those plugins. When they do not, you are stuck waiting or hunting for alternatives.
Then there is the security question. According to Patchstack, 96% of WordPress security vulnerabilities come from plugins. In 2025 alone, over 11,300 new plugin vulnerabilities were discovered. That is not a fringe issue. That is a fundamental architectural problem. A WordPress plugin has full access to your database and filesystem. There is no isolation, no sandboxing, no capability-based permission model. You install a plugin and you are trusting it with everything.
And let us talk about Gutenberg. The block editor was supposed to modernise WordPress, but most developers we know, ourselves included, would rather work with a clean backend built on custom fields. We build backends that guide the client, keep the content structured, and give us total control over the front-end output. Gutenberg gets in the way of that workflow. It adds complexity where we want simplicity, and bloat where we want performance.
A Community Under Strain
Beyond the technical issues, there is the matter of community. The WordPress ecosystem has become increasingly toxic, and unfortunately, that toxicity has trickled down from the very top. What should be a collaborative, open-source community has become fractured by ego, legal disputes, and power struggles. It is exhausting to watch, and it makes the whole ecosystem feel less welcoming than it once was. Some fresh blood and genuine competition might be exactly what the space needs to shake things up.
So What Is EmDash?
EmDash is a full-stack TypeScript CMS built on top of Astro, the web framework that has been gaining serious traction for content-driven websites. It is serverless by default, MIT-licensed, and designed from the ground up to solve the problems that WordPress cannot.
The headline feature is sandboxed plugins. Every EmDash plugin runs in its own isolated environment using Cloudflare's Dynamic Workers. Each plugin must declare exactly what it needs in a manifest, and it can only perform those declared actions. No sneaky database access, no filesystem snooping, no undeclared network requests. It is similar to an OAuth permissions flow. You know exactly what you are granting before you install anything.
Content modelling is native. You can define custom content types directly in the admin panel, and each type gets its own properly ordered database collection. No more cramming everything into a single wp_posts table and relying on plugins like ACF to make sense of it. For developers like us who live and breathe structured content, this is a breath of fresh air.
Built for AI Agentic Workflows (and Humans)
Here is where it gets really interesting. EmDash is designed to be managed by AI agents as well as humans. It ships with a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, a CLI tool, and Agent Skills that describe the CMS capabilities to AI coding tools. That means your AI assistant can create content types, migrate data, build plugins, and manage your site programmatically.
WordPress was built for humans in a pre-AI world. EmDash was built for both. At Forty Miles West, we are already using agentic workflows to ship faster, and a CMS that natively supports this way of working is exactly where things need to go. No more waiting on third-party developers to build features for us. We can build them ourselves, with AI assistance, in a fraction of the time.
We Tried It. It Works.
We did not just read the docs and form an opinion. We got stuck in. We built a news editorial site from scratch using EmDash, and had it deployed and running in around five hours. That includes content modelling, theming with Astro, and a full deployment. For a CMS that has not even reached version 1.0 yet, that is genuinely impressive.
The developer experience is clean. If you are comfortable with TypeScript and Astro, you will feel right at home. Theming is straightforward: pages, layouts, components, and styles, all in a structure that any modern front-end developer would recognise. The admin interface uses passkeys for authentication by default, which is a nice security touch, and role-based access control is built in from day one.
Addressing the Critics
We have seen the naysayers already. "It only works on Cloudflare." That is simply not true. EmDash can run on any Node.js server. Yes, it is optimised for Cloudflare Workers with the scale-to-zero serverless model, but the project explicitly supports self-hosted Node.js deployments on any VPS, EC2 instance, or container platform you choose. It is open source and MIT-licensed. You are not locked in.
"It is not user-focused." Also not true. The admin panel is clean and intuitive, content modelling is visual and accessible, and there is even an online playground where you can try the interface without deploying anything. EmDash is thoughtfully designed for content editors and site administrators, not just developers.
The reality is that people with a heavy investment in the WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem have a financial incentive to dismiss anything that threatens their revenue. Page builders, premium plugin bundles, managed WordPress hosting. These are billion-pound industries built on top of WordPress, and a genuine competitor changes the calculus for all of them. Of course they are going to push back.
The Future We Are Betting On
At Forty Miles West, we believe page builders and bloated plugin stacks are going to become a thing of the past, especially for advanced developers. The tooling has moved on. Agentic AI workflows let us ship faster and bring ideas to life quicker than ever before. We do not need to wait for a plugin developer to build something, then wait for them to fix a vulnerability, then wait for them to add the feature we actually needed in the first place.
EmDash is not a finished product. It is a v0.1.0 preview. There are rough edges, missing features, and a long road ahead. But the architecture is sound, the vision is clear, and the fact that it already works as well as it does at this stage is encouraging. WordPress migration tooling is already in place, including a WXR import and an exporter plugin that makes moving content across straightforward.
We are not abandoning WordPress tomorrow. Our clients rely on it, and we will continue to support and build with it where it makes sense. But we are paying very close attention to EmDash, and we would encourage every web developer and agency to do the same. This could be a real contender once more features land and the ecosystem matures.
The web moves fast. The best agencies move with it.
Ready to Explore EmDash for Your Next Project?
At Forty Miles West, we are already building with EmDash and helping forward-thinking businesses get ahead of the curve. Whether you want a brand new site built on EmDash or you are looking to migrate an existing WordPress site to a faster, more secure platform, we can help. Get in touch for a free quote and let us show you what the next generation of web development looks like.