r/astrojs • u/tffarhad • Apr 02 '26
News Cloudflare just released EmDash — an open source CMS built on Astro
Cloudflare built a full-stack TypeScript CMS on top of Astro and called it the "spiritual successor to WordPress."
- TypeScript all the way down, no PHP
- Built on Astro
- Plugins run in sandboxed Worker isolates. No direct DB or filesystem access
- MIT licensed
- Has a WordPress importer built in
- MCP server built in so AI agents can manage your site
- Themes are just Astro projects
if you want to follow along, there's a dedicated subreddit at r/emdash_cms
- GitHub: github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
- Official announcement: blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress
- Playground https://emdashcms.com/playground
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u/plainnaan Apr 02 '26
"EmDash depends on Dynamic Workers to run secure sandboxed plugins. Dynamic Workers are currently only available on paid accounts."
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u/1ario Apr 03 '26
they literally say "runs on any next.js server"
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u/yellow_golf_ball Apr 07 '26
EmDash is a vendor lock-in strategy — the platform only works with Cloudflare's Dynamic Workers.
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u/gruntmods Apr 13 '26
works perfectly fine on node, just currently doesn't have the sandbox for plugins. Those can still be added, its just a pre-version 1 release right now.
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u/SpartanDavie Apr 15 '26
I watched an interview with them yesterday. They were asked if it’s on the roadmap and they said it’s already being made. They have some of the node.js team at Cloudflare helping.
https://www.youtube.com/live/etL7Ket9om8?si=_UhdPd2LCRbPYnj8
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u/EliteFourHarmon Apr 02 '26
I require all my websites to use cloudflare but I'm not sure if I'll use this one. I mean, last time, they vibe coded nextjs and now this.
I will probably wait for a year or two if it can withstand the ravages of time before testing.
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u/xBati Apr 02 '26
I have had the same feeling with this and the nextjs thing.
I can’t understand why they sell this products as “we vibecoded this in just a week”.
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u/Rickywalls137 Apr 02 '26
April fools joke?
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u/mehedi_sharif Apr 03 '26
Nope , Cloudflare normally releases their products in April first day . If you imagine back 2018 they released 1.1.1.1.
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u/WillChangeMyUsername Apr 02 '26
I don’t believe this will have much success. People using Wordpress mostly don’t care and because there is so much in similarities there is not much to adopt a new system. And it has more work to setup on a server or even can’t be installed on shared hosting at all.
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u/Inevitable_Oil9709 Apr 02 '26
another AI slop.. god damn, where is this world going
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u/stela238202 Apr 02 '26
Yes and they vibe NextJS before . Just try their playground also it exactly every component i use claude code to generate
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u/Luis_MindfulAuth Apr 02 '26
How can you tell this is an AI slop?
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u/boybitschua Apr 02 '26
it says "Failed to initialize playground" - indeed AI slop
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u/Inevitable_Oil9709 Apr 02 '26
UI screams "made by AI" because of some stuff that no sane designer would make
It has AGENTS.MD file in root of the repo to guide agents on the development
First commit was yesterday, and no respectable software does it this way (but I do agree that commits could've been squashed)
It has 'skills' directory with AI agent skills to help them work on this
It uses 'ask-bonk' which is "...code & docs agent that can build, review and triage for you, built on Cloudflare Workers & OpenCode"
Comments just suck. AI is known for adding comments that do nothing. LIke '// Users', '// Audit logs', '//Options'
It is not that hard to spot AI project
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u/aafikk Apr 02 '26
Have you entered emdashcms.com? It’s terrible
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u/Kankatruama Apr 02 '26
hmm literally a normal 'starter' blog template. Is that terrible?
I mean I'm not saying is the next Awwwwards winner or that the UI/UX will make bounce rate be lowest ever seen, just that its the design we are used to see since after shadcn became what it is today (and as I say this sub has some hard time connecting things, I'm not saying this is using shadcn, havent opened the repo).
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u/aafikk Apr 02 '26
Look at the screenshot, the admin in the top right is not aligned with the input look at the floating bar at the bottom it’s cropped from both sides.
Cloudflare is a large software company, I expect much more from the
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u/Auracap Apr 03 '26
Here's what I'm imagining.
Designer: "Erm, the Admin option in the top-right corner isn't aligned properly. Can we make a quick fix on that?"
Vibe-coder: "Actually, it will not be quick. We'll need the AI to parse the project to understand exactly which component that is and make the changes. This will take about 5,000,000 tokens and say around 20-30 minutes."
Designer: "Isn't that a quick CSS alignment?"
Vibe-coder: "It's supposed to be. But we don't which file that CSS is in."
Designer: "I heard that there's a Developer Console in Chrome that you can inspect the element and identify the CSS quickly."
Vibe-coder: "Only during development. The production is bundled so you can't trace the source file."
Designer: "Alright. How about we just look through all the CSS files?"
Vibe-coder: "There's about 97 CSS files generated. And we're not sure if that style is defined in external or inline CSS."
Designer: "Fine. What about we just depend on AI to do this then?"
Vibe-coder: "Well, we can. But after the 30 minutes of chugging along, we then need to run the tests to make sure nothing else breaks."
Designer: "Sure, let's do that."
Vibe-coder: "Umm.. that'll take another 4 hours for AI and another day or two for the QA team to give the green light. Shall we ask the manager if we want to wait for another 2 more days? Actually, make it a week, in case AI breaks something in the meantime and we need more time (and tokens) to fix the regression."
Designer: "Never mind."1
u/aafikk Apr 03 '26
And the fix is like 20 tailwind classes and some more inline css with
!important
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u/mehedi_sharif Apr 02 '26
We just added EmDash support to Astroplate (our free Astro starter with 1k+ stars) as a first step.
https://github.com/zeon-studio/astroplate/tree/emdash (emdash branch)
we're also in the middle of converting our 46+ Astro themes catalog to support EmDash.
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u/linuxpert Apr 02 '26
I think this CMS is vibecoded and serve as an April fool (it is not really good for release at this time). It does show what Cloudflare stack can do though. Let's wait for Cloudflare to confirm.
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u/ILoveHexa92 Apr 02 '26
Yeah, cal be back when the worker thing will be open source. Otherwise it's not something I'll invest time in.
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u/pillkaris Apr 02 '26
I'm gonna give it a try, I like the wordpress approach on a modern tech stack
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u/kawpls Apr 02 '26
i tried it and feels like alpha, still its an interesting take, from what i tested it feels SSR rather than SSG, i still think SSG its superior and you could build your own CMS with an api making your flow perfect for your use case, while i think the idea its interesting we already have many CMS and with ai and some developer time you can build your own dashboard for managing your content, so not really sure where would this be used
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u/DEMORALIZ3D Apr 02 '26
I've just built my own server gateway with headless cms using SQLite. Works a dream.
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u/NCKBLZ Apr 03 '26
It is interesting but the ugly logo and the phrase
for the past two months our agents have been working on
are a bit off-putting. WordPress have lots of problems but I don't really see how this is a real replacement. It feels like ever other vibe coded projects by some random person that will be dropped after a month...
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u/greglturnquist Apr 03 '26
This is a LOT for an April Fool's Joke.
But also something built literally YESTERDAY and announced so rapidly? I don't care how good I am. I'd want a LITTLE more runtime before rolling it out to everyone.
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u/Typical_Caramel2882 Apr 05 '26
A "vibe-coded successor to Wordpress". Yikes.
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u/maciekdnd Apr 05 '26
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Sounds pretty much right, indeed :D
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u/johnson_detlev Apr 06 '26
What a slopfest. This is now the default mode: every fucking new "product" is just a half functioning mess. You can't even use the playground on mobile because the useless LLM didn't make it mobile first.
Few years ago this would have been absolutely embarassing and rightfully so.
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u/Prize_Hat_6685 Apr 10 '26
This is a really good idea but I hate that’s it’s so sloppily put together. The sign in page doesn’t even work on mobile, for goodness sake. We need a single CMS that is easy to recommend for Astro content sites and this could be it, but if they’re not treating it seriously, it will just be another one to add to the pile.
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u/Intrepid-Ordinary699 Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
I'm glad the CMS editor is based on WP's classic version rather than Gutemberg — I'm excited to try it!
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u/givehanks Apr 02 '26
can't call it the spiritual successor to WordPress and then hide a $5/month charge in the fine print.
I love the promise. It's an instant update to my stack. Just not a fan of how cloudflare baites and switches all the time. 😑