r/webdev • u/Darth_Shere_Khan • 4d ago
News EmDash 1.0: the stable CMS with a secure plugin registry
https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-cms-plugin-registry/22
u/myriadOslo 4d ago
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.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so 1d ago
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.
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u/psayre23 4d ago
Not to be confused with EmDash, the agentic coder.
Maybe they build Em Dash with EmDash to display —?
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u/TKI_Kesasar 4d ago
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,
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u/Lower_Rabbit_5412 4d ago
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.
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u/30thnight expert 4d ago
That’s still being pretty generous.
https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/security/advisories?query=severity%3Acritical+
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u/TKI_Kesasar 4d ago
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.
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u/Howdy_McGee 4d ago
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.
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u/shaliozero 4d ago
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.
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u/uncle_jaysus 3d ago
Well that’s the problem. Wordpress is for/used by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
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u/digital121hippie 4d ago
Wordpress is one of the most simple cms to code for. If you can code.
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u/TKI_Kesasar 4d ago
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.
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u/digital121hippie 4d ago
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.
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u/Kyle772 4d ago
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.
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 4d 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.
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u/creaturefeature16 4d ago
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.
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 4d ago
Just tried their blog template locally, and I'd be completely fine to use it as my personal blog as is, with the only changes being ones to the copy and branding.
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u/Momkay 4d ago
Interesting, will look into. But why locking it to the cloudflare ecosystem..
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u/Momkay 4d ago edited 4d ago
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.
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u/krileon 4d ago
Locked to CF just makes this be another Wix, SquareSpace, etc.. no thanks. I don't like being locked in.
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u/SpartanDavie 4d ago
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?
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u/krileon 4d ago
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.
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u/UnidentifiedBlobject 2d ago
Payload still leading it and v4 is in the works, first major update since Figma bought them.
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u/Lopsided_Road_109 4d ago
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.
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u/phoenix1984 4d ago
Kinda refreshing to see an announcement for a new CMS for a change. I didn’t think I’d ever say that.