EmDash: A Fresh Take on CMS (maciekpalmowski.dev)
47 points by taubek 3 hours ago
ramon156 3 hours ago
Embarrassingly badly generated article, with no real takeaway other than "I let an LLM dig into the code, here's what words it chose to describe EmDash".
> Joost put it well:
> It’s not a CMS with AI features bolted on. It’s a CMS where AI agents are first-class builders.
Joost asked ChatGPT what he should say about the CMS, and you felt like it was a good quote.
> Why I won’t use it
> I migrated to Astro partly to get away from the CMS.
Well then you never needed a CMS in the first place? I also don't need use a CMS for my site, but I still maintain a CMS for customers because they do need it.
> Does it solve the right problem?
This is the only thing I cared about from this article, and the answer is [bag of words]. Are people really this desperate to put their names on new tech? Is it an "I want to be included!" mindset that gets people to prompt an hour of their life away?
> Astro itself wasn’t an obvious success from day one.
Astro is just the framework they built on, what does this sentence have to do with EmDash? I'm so confused about what this article is trying to tell me.
Also, how come you did not write anything about what it was like when WordPress had just released? I'm sure there are enough people who can help out with that. Did it have competitors? I wouldn't know, I was eating sand when it came out.
steve_adams_86 2 hours ago
To say Astro wasn't a success from day one is a truism. No JavaScript frameworks have been an obvious success from day one. How could they be? Even very well-designed and innovative frameworks and libraries struggle to gain adoption in such a crowded space where tooling as significant as a framework has major inertia. It really is a bunch of words.
nine_k 31 minutes ago
The author notes that their website is a result of static generation, while EmDash needs a server beside an HTTP server and a bunch of static files.
It's partly a fair point. Anything that does not dynamically change with each reload should be generated a a static file, and served as such. When the backing data change via the admin interface, then the page should re-generate. I suppose it's the proper caching approach, and I assume any sane CMS does this now (yes, even Wordpress).
But what a static site cannot do is user-specific content. And EmDash has a elaborate structure of user access levels, various auth methods, etc. Once you have to have a user session, there's no way around having an application that handles this. The simplest example is having a comments section.
leetrout 3 hours ago
It's on the front page right now below this link but just for anyone looking later:
EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
ulrischa 19 minutes ago
Emdash has nothing in common worh wordpress. There are no blocks
givan 3 hours ago
I'm developing Vvveb CMS and WordPress is very inspiring, the standard to which everyone compares in the industry.
One of the reason WordPress is so ubiquitous is that it's very easy to host and it doesn't need advanced technical knowledge.
PHP hosting is very cheap and WordPress installation is very easy, it's just one click in some hosting dashboards.
The Javascript ecosystem is complex, you need to be a developer and have access to command line to install most Javascript CMSes and need a vps or more expensive hosting.
cloudpeaklabs 2 hours ago
The hosting story is WordPress's biggest moat and most JS CMS projects underestimate it. Though I'd argue the gap is narrowing - a Node app on a $5 VPS with PM2 is getting close to shared PHP hosting simplicity, and platforms like Railway and Fly have made deploys nearly painless. The real remaining barrier is that non-technical users can't self-manage a Node process the way they manage WordPress through cPanel.
patates 2 hours ago
What people also underestimate is the new power of the index.php that comes from the LLMs.
Tell claude to create a php backend to your portfolio html template, drag the generated file to the cheapest server, and you already have a custom CMS.
katsura 3 hours ago
Neither the "Cloudflare’s own announcement" nor the "Joost’s take" links point to the right URL, should be lower case.
palmiak 2 hours ago
Thanks. I realized I was writing "emdash" and when I fixed it, I fixed a bit too much.