A new publishing platform called EmDash is positioning itself as the “spiritual successor to WordPress,” promising to retain the flexibility of plugins while eliminating the security risks that have long plagued the world’s most popular content management system.
Security concerns around WordPress plugins have grown in recent years, with reports of vulnerabilities affecting millions of sites. By addressing this pain point directly, EmDash aims to carve out a niche in a crowded market of CMS platforms, positioning itself as the next evolution in digital publishing.
WordPress powers over 40% of the Internet. It is a massive success that has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and created a global community of WordPress developers. But the WordPress open source project will be 24 years old this year. Hosting a website has changed dramatically during that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 didn’t exist. In the intervening years, that task has gone from renting virtual private servers, to uploading a JavaScript bundle to a globally distributed network at virtually no cost. It’s time to upgrade the most popular CMS on the Internet to take advantage of this change.
EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites.
EmDash is fully open source, MIT licensed, and available on GitHub. While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license. We hope that allows more developers to adapt, extend, and participate in EmDash’s development.
EmDash is being pitched not just as another CMS, but as publishing infrastructure for the secure web. Its creators believe enterprises, media houses, and independent publishers will be drawn to a platform that combines scalability with peace of mind.
You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta:
Or you can try out the admin interface here in the EmDash Playground:
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What WordPress has accomplished
The story of WordPress is a triumph of open source that enabled publishing at a scale never before seen. Few projects have had the same recognisable impact on the generation raised on the Internet. The contributors to WordPress’s core, and its many thousands of plugin and theme developers have built a platform that democratised publishing for millions; many lives and livelihoods being transformed by this ubiquitous software.There will always be a place for WordPress, but there is also a lot more space for the world of content publishing to grow. A decade ago, people picking up a keyboard universally learned to publish their blogs with WordPress. Today it’s just as likely that person picks up Astro, or another TypeScript framework to learn and build with. The ecosystem needs an option that empowers a wide audience, in the same way it needed WordPress 23 years ago.
EmDash is committed to building on what WordPress created: an open source publishing stack that anyone can install and use at little cost, while fixing the core problems that WordPress cannot solve.
Solving the WordPress plugin security crisis
WordPress’ plugin architecture is fundamentally insecure. 96% of security issues for WordPress sites originate in plugins. In 2025, more high severity vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem than the previous two years combined.Why, after over two decades, is WordPress plugin security so problematic?
A WordPress plugin is a PHP script that hooks directly into WordPress to add or modify functionality. There is no isolation: a WordPress plugin has direct access to the WordPress site’s database and filesystem. When you install a WordPress plugin, you are trusting it with access to nearly everything, and trusting it to handle every malicious input or edge case perfectly.
EmDash solves this. In EmDash, each plugin runs in its own isolated sandbox: a Dynamic Worker. Rather than giving direct access to underlying data, EmDash provides the plugin with capabilities via bindings, based on what the plugin explicitly declares that it needs in its manifest. This security model has a strict guarantee: an EmDash plugin can only perform the actions explicitly declared in its manifest. You can know and trust upfront, before installing a plugin, exactly what you are granting it permission to do, similar to going through an OAuth flow and granting a 3rd party app a specific set of scoped permissions.
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import { definePlugin } from "emdash";
export default () =>
definePlugin({
id: "notify-on-publish",
version: "1.0.0",
capabilities: ["read:content", "email:send"],
hooks: {
"content:afterSave": async (event, ctx) => {
if (event.collection !== "posts" || event.content.status !== "published") return;
await ctx.email!.send({
to: "editors@example.com",
subject: `New post published: ${event.content.title}`,
text: `"${event.content.title}" is now live.`,
});
ctx.log.info(`Notified editors about ${event.content.id}`);
},
},
});
This plugin explicitly requests two capabilities:
content:afterSave to hook into the content lifecycle, and email:send to access the ctx.email function. It is impossible for the plugin to do anything other than use these capabilities.Solving plugin security means solving marketplace lock-in
WordPress plugin security is such a real risk that WordPress.org manually reviews and approves each plugin in its marketplace. At the time of writing, that review queue is over 800 plugins long, and takes at least two weeks to traverse.EmDash plugins have two important properties that mitigate this marketplace lock-in:
- Plugins can have any license: they run independently of EmDash and share no code.
- Plugin code runs independently in a secure sandbox: a plugin can be provided to an EmDash site, and trusted, without the EmDash site ever seeing the code.
Every EmDash site has x402 support built in — charge for access to content
x402 is an open, neutral standard for Internet-native payments. It lets anyone on the Internet easily charge, and any client pay on-demand, on a pay-per-use basis.EmDash has built-in support for x402. This means anyone with an EmDash site can charge for access to their content without requiring subscriptions and with zero engineering work.
Solving scale-to-zero for WordPress hosting platforms
WordPress is not serverless: it requires provisioning and managing servers. EmDash is different: it’s built to run on serverless platforms, and make the most out of the v8 isolate architecture of Cloudflare’s open source runtime workerd.EmDash is different: it’s built to run on serverless platforms, and make the most out of the v8 isolate architecture of Cloudflare’s open source runtime workerd. On an incoming request, the Workers runtime instantly spins up an isolate to execute code and serve a response. It scales back down to zero if there are no requests. And it only bills for CPU time (time spent doing actual work).
You can run EmDash anywhere, on any Node.js server — but on Cloudflare you can run millions of instances of EmDash using Cloudflare for Platforms that each instantly scale fully to zero or up to as many RPS as you need to handle, using the exact same network and runtime that the biggest websites in the world rely on.
Beyond cost optimizations and performance benefits, we’ve bet on this architecture at Cloudflare in part because we believe in having low cost and free tiers, and that everyone should be able to build websites that scale. We’re excited to help platforms extend the benefits of this architecture to their own customers, both big and small.
Modern frontend theming and architecture via Astro
EmDash is powered by Astro, the web framework for content-driven websites. To create an EmDash theme, you create an Astro project that includes:- Pages: Astro routes for rendering content (homepage, blog posts, archives, etc.)
- Layouts: Shared HTML structure
- Components: Reusable UI elements (navigation, cards, footers)
- Styles: CSS or Tailwind configuration
- A seed file: JSON that tells the CMS what content types and fields to create
This makes creating themes familiar to frontend developers who are increasingly choosing Astro, and to LLMs which are already trained on ASTRO.
WordPress themes, though incredibly flexible, operate with a lot of the same security risks as plugins, and the more popular and commonplace your theme, the more of a target it is. Themes run through integrating with functions.php which is an all-encompassing execution environment, enabling your theme to be both incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous. EmDash themes, as with dynamic plugins, turns this expectation on its head. Your theme can never perform database operations.
WordPress themes, though incredibly flexible, operate with a lot of the same security risks as plugins, and the more popular and commonplace your theme, the more of a target it is. Themes run through integrating with functions.php which is an all-encompassing execution environment, enabling your theme to be both incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous. EmDash themes, as with dynamic plugins, turns this expectation on its head. Your theme can never perform database operations.
An AI Native CMS — MCP, CLI, and Skills for EmDash
EmDash is designed to be managed programmatically by your AI agents. It provides the context and the tools that your agents need, including Agent Skills, EmDash CLI, and a built-in MCP Server.Pluggable authentication, with Passkeys by default
The least fun part about working with any CMS is doing the rote migration of content: finding and replacing strings, migrating custom fields from one format to another, renaming, reordering and moving things around. This is either boring repetitive work or requires one-off scripts and “single-use” plugins and tools that are usually neither fun to write nor to use.
EmDash is designed to be managed programmatically by your AI agents. It provides the context and the tools that your agents need, including:
EmDash is designed to be managed programmatically by your AI agents. It provides the context and the tools that your agents need, including:
- Agent Skills: Each EmDash instance includes Agent Skills that describe to your agent the capabilities EmDash can provide to plugins, the hooks that can trigger plugins, guidance on how to structure a plugin, and even how to port legacy WordPress themes to EmDash natively. When you give an agent an EmDash codebase, EmDash provides everything the agent needs to be able to customize your site in the way you need.
- EmDash CLI: The EmDash CLI enables your agent to interact programmatically with your local or remote instance of EmDash. You can upload media, search for content, create and manage schemas, and do the same set of things you can do in the Admin UI.
- Built-in MCP Server: Every EmDash instance provides its own remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing you to do the same set of things you can do in the Admin UI.
Pluggable authentication, with Passkeys by default
EmDash uses passkey-based authentication by default, meaning there are no passwords to leak and no brute-force vectors to defend against. User management includes familiar role-based access control out of the box: administrators, editors, authors, and contributors, each scoped strictly to the actions they need. Authentication is pluggable, so you can set EmDash up to work with your SSO provider, and automatically provision access based on IdP metadata.Import your WordPress sites to EmDash
You can import an existing WordPress site by either going to WordPress admin and exporting a WXR file, or by installing the EmDash Exporter plugin on a WordPress site, which configures a secure endpoint that is only exposed to you, and protected by a WordPress Application Password you control. Migrating content takes just a few minutes, and automatically works to bring any attached media into EmDash’s media library.
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Try it
EmDash is v0.1.0 preview, and we’d love you to try it, give feedback, and we welcome contributions to the EmDash GitHub repository.If you’re just playing around and want to first understand what’s possible — try out the admin interface in the EmDash Playground.
To create a new EmDash site locally, via the CLI, run:
npm create emdash@latest Or you can do the same via the Cloudflare dashboard below:
We’re excited to see what you build, and if you're active in the WordPress community, as a hosting platform, a plugin or theme author, or otherwise — we’d love to hear from you. Email us at emdash@cloudflare.com, and tell us what you’d like to see from the EmDash project.
If you want to stay up to date with major EmDash developments, you can leave your email address here.
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