- Cloudflare has launched its own CMS: EmDash
- EmDash plugins are secure by design, WordPress has a queue of 800 to test
- WordPress users can easily migrate to the “native AI CMS” that is EmDash
Cloudflare has introduced EmDash, a new open source CMS that it considers the “spiritual successor” to WordPress.
The company explained that an overwhelming majority (96%) of WordPress vulnerabilities come from plugins, which have full access to the database and file system, and run in the same environment as the core code without any isolation.
To address this, Cloudflare is putting each EmDash plugin in an isolated sandbox, called Dynamic Workers, and plugins must declare exactly what permission they need up front.
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Cloudflare says EmDash is more secure than WordPress
In its announcement, Cloudflare criticized the fact that existing WordPress plugins must be trusted and that their availability on centralized plugin marketplaces serves to give them a good reputation. Currently, WordPress.org manually reviews and approves all plugins on the platform, and there is currently a queue of around 800 plugins that need to be verified.
Instead of this trust, EmDash plugins must be secure by design. And because developers can submit plugins with any license that run independently of EmDash and run in secure sandboxes, Cloudflare can remove the market lock it criticizes.
Better yet, EmDash is built on the zero-scale principle, meaning it only bills for CPU time when it’s actually running: “it scales to zero if there are no requests,” the company wrote.
“We’ve gone with this architecture at Cloudflare in part because we believe in having free and low-cost tiers, and that everyone should be able to build websites at that scale,” added senior product manager Matt Taylor and senior principal systems engineer Matt Kane.
For the interface, EmDash is powered by Astro, which allows users to create page themes, layouts, components, styles, and more.
Finally, Cloudflare describes EmDash as an “AI native CMS” that includes Agent Skills, CLI, and an integrated MCP server.
Users who want to migrate from WordPress can import their WXR file or, interestingly, install a plugin (EmDash Exporter).
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