You’ve heard about EmDash, Cloudflare’s “spiritual successor to WordPress.” It’s an interesting demo with some good ideas. But a successor to WordPress? Not quite.
Why WordPress
WordPress didn’t reach 42.5% of the web by being insecure. It got there because an open ecosystem creates more value than a closed one.
The highlight feature of EmDash is its sandboxed plugin model, where plugins run in isolated environments. But that sandboxing only works on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. You can host EmDash elsewhere, but the security model doesn’t come with you.
WordPress runs anywhere: a shared host, a managed provider, your own server. Whether you’re running your blog, a business, WhiteHouse.gov, or streaming Artemis II’s lunar flyby on NASA.gov to millions of people, WordPress is the CMS with proven scalability.
Sure, it’s a dinosaur. But that’s not an insult.
WordPress has 23 years of plugins, themes, documentation, and proven patterns. If you need a CMS, why would you run one that launched days ago, or even years ago?
What we can learn from EmDash
WordPress has agent skills, but the EmDash skills are more opinionated and workflow-focused. I particularly like the push for migrating WordPress plugins and themes. We can learn from these to progress Data Liberation further, adding more import paths from other sites and applications into WordPress.
EmDash also ships a content modeling UI with custom fields and content types built into the admin. WordPress can do all of this with the Fields API, and AI is good at setting it up in code. But there’s no core UI for managing content types visually.
We’ve explored a similar concept, but EmDash’s take is simpler, and that’s a gap worth closing.
More broadly, WordPress needs a more opinionated developer experience. WP-CLI, Studio, Studio CLI, WP AI Client, and MCP Adapter are solid foundations, but there’s not yet a clear starting point that ties the technicalities of WordPress together.
That ambiguity is fine for experienced developers who already know their way around, but it can be a high wall for our agents.
EmDash made all those choices upfront because it could. WordPress has to get there by converging on the concepts that have built up over time. A proper front door.
The actual competition
Companies will keep launching CMS competitors aimed at WordPress’s market share. But the more interesting trend isn’t another new CMS.
For the first time since W3Techs started tracking historical yearly trends, sites built without any CMS is trending up.
I don’t expect a wave of people switching from WordPress to EmDash. But I am curious about the people who think they don’t need a CMS at all because they can vibe-code a static site in an afternoon.
Even so, WordPress has been democratizing publishing for 23 years and will keep doing so for many more.
New projects like EmDash are a reminder that complexity has a cost. When you start from scratch, simplicity comes easy. WordPress has to earn it with every release.
People are building with agents, and WordPress has to be incredibly easy for those agents to work with. That’s what EmDash gets the most right, and what WordPress could take pointers from.
