Have you tried out EmDash yet?

[MattieTK]

Hi everyone,

After the blog post yesterday which was absolutely not an April Fool¹, we're bowled over by the enthusiasm for EmDash.

I wanted to start consolidating some discussion for those that have tried out EmDash to give us some initial feedback and tell us about what you're building or excited to build with it (and if you need something more from us to do so).

Please do leave some replies in this thread. I'll be reading them all with the team.

Footnotes

1. Fun fact, Cloudflare has a bit of a history of announcing big exciting things on the 1st of April: we launched 1.1.1.1 that day, and WARP. ↩

[David-Gaffney]

Great fact about 1.1.1.1.

I tried the playground and it looked very promising for day 1.

However, when I checked on mobile (iPhone 17 Pro) the first pop up was too big for the screen, the left side bar drop down menu's didn't work at all, the arrows change but nothing shows and the bottom PLAYGROUND bar is too wide (I know this is only used in playground but I think it's worth just changing it to be responsive).

I would love to share the playground link with people to show them and to create a little project myself but with the mobile version currently lacking I will wait for now as they look like simple fixes so hopefully won't be long.

Anyway, well done and thanks for making something with such huge potential open source.

Looking forward for what's to come

[MattieTK]

Thanks so much David! I've opened an issue about the mobile UI and we will definitely get to this. #92

[BlackDahlia313]

I'm definitely watching like a hawk. I have some plugin ideas to create for it.

I'm really liking the initial launch. I can see there is still a long road ahead, but I am here for it as another Matt. lol

I had architected a pretty big enterprise solution via WP over the last couple years, but I am really looking at the enterprise potential for EmDash.

[MattieTK]

@BlackDahlia313 Thanks another-Matt!

What do you think are the essential pieces that would get you closest to feeling this is enterprise ready, from your experience?

[ascorbic]

Third Matt here. We'd love to hear your feedback on enterprise use cases. We're still getting onto the process for plugin publishing, but I hope you've noticed that there are ways to develop locally without needing to publish to a marketplace

[taupecat]

[MattieTK]

[ToddHebebrand]

It fits in beautifully with what I've been building, an Astro website AI builder that deploys to Cloudflare (pressless.io). I'm excited to create some themes and plugins for website design.

[oriolgfarssac]

Just spent some time playing around with EmDash and wanted to share some thoughts since you asked.

First off, it genuinely feels like a breath of fresh air. It's fast, lightweight, and very intuitive. The fact that the menu structure mirrors the layout of WordPress menu is a smart move, it makes the transition feel way less scary for someone coming from WP. That familiarity goes a long way.

I've been using Astro for a while now and honestly I was always missing a "vanilla" CMS that just worked naturally with it without feeling bolted on or over-engineered.

One thing I did notice coming from a WordPress agency background, is the lack of a flexible content system (think ACF Flexible Content) is something that will be a blocker for real client work. Editors need to be able to build and reorder page sections through the admin without manually adding each component in the code. I saw it's already flagged as an issue, so it looks like you're aware of it, which is great. I'd love to help contribute somewhere it's needed once I've dug into the codebase a bit more.

Overall though, really impressed. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

[ilbarone87]

Hey thank you for this CMS! It feels very smooth. Personale i would like to see more more documentation and tutorial. For example i was looking for a way to use custom IdPs (eg Zitadel or EntraID). Obviously more plugin as well, is there a step by step tutorial on how to migrate themes or plugins?

[fortymileswest]

Yes, I have already built a test site. Took 5 hours for a basic editorial news blog. So easy to work with and deploy. https://studioproaudio.com/ Once people start making plugins for this, it will be insane. @MattieTK is there going to be expanded custom fields for repeater and gallery?

[MattieTK]

We are missing a few features from Portable Text to do repeaters and galleries currently but I have learned today they are on the way and we could possibly hack around it in any case.

[fortymileswest]

@MattieTK, great to hear.
Question, where will new plugins that are not core be available?

[fortymileswest]

I love the fact that @MattieTK and the team have not gone the block editor route.

[schiste]

I was in the process of tweaking a Astro+Payload CMS (platforming a part of Payload to "manage multisite"). I'm moving to emdash altogether, I was already on the "edge" as I have a Cloudflare setup let's be even more edgy by using a 1 day old repo.

A couple of feedbacks from my current deployment and migration efforts:

• Import is emdash/astro (default export), not emdash
• Database config needs sqlite({ url: 'file:./data.db' }) from emdash/db — passing a bare string silently fails
• slug, status, locale, id, and timestamps are reserved field names — EmDash auto-manages them, don't define them in your seed
• No "globals" concept — we model singleton data (homepage settings, company facts) as single-entry collections

Now I'm in the process of building capacities through plugins and a custom abstraction layer (to "manage" multi site things). Mostly focusing on porting my "Content CI/CD" through 8 plugins ( auto-translation (20 locales), SEO optimization, content QA, cross-site sync, shared media, coverage matrix, GEO, and deploy triggering. And of course finishing multisite support (separate D1 per site, content sharing via Service Bindings RPC) and admin i18n.

Overall, stack is clear, what would be amazing if you could is to share a timeline of what you are working on in the coming days. It would make it easier to build and share those capacities properly :)

Other than that it's great to see that project being built in the open!

[fortymileswest]

Yes, would be good to have a roadmap

[ithiru]

Definitely a welcome addition. Vulnerability, Scale to Zero (Cost Effective), AI Capability, Modern framework are the key winning in this approach. Kudos for taking this iniiative.

I tried my importing from an existing site. The import went through fine easily, it failed for bigger upload (400+ MB). Tried enabling emdash plugin and imported via the emdash API endpoint, it went smooth. Few things need to be fixed.

1. The date of import is current date not the original date of the post.
2. If the title of the post is non-english throws 404
3. It shows I have 1000+ posts, but in admin posts page - it shows 50 rows of 3 pages only. But when I view on preview site, it shows 1000+ posts.
4. Tried changing the slug on Posts collection to /{id}/{slug} didn't work.
5. Categories, tags were not imported.

[emircanerkul]

It is great! Also shared in linkedin. Thank you. Looking great, except some minor ui issues.

[campakt]

Currently just finished my first site and have to say this thing is gonna be unstoppable. Gonna build another site out and then will drop back to give some more feedback but gotta say so far i am loving it.

[tohaitrieu]

Have anyone run Emdash in Production?

[fortymileswest]

Yes, studioproaudio.com

[omgitsgela]

We’ve started trying EmDash for Rocky Mountain Rails, a large scale train club in Colorado.

Our current public site is still WordPress at:

• https://rockymountainrails.com

And we’re evaluating EmDash on our dev deployment here:

• https://dev.rockymountainrails.com

Rocky Mountain Rails is an adult, family-friendly large scale railroad club located near Waterton Canyon in the southwestern Denver metro area, and the site serves two main purposes for us:

• as a community platform for our roughly 100 members
• as an information source for prospective new members who want to learn about the club, visit the tracksite, or join

We’re especially interested in EmDash because we are self-hosting on a VPS, not using Cloudflare, and we want tighter control over our stack and how we build automation around it. We’re also using AI-assisted tooling heavily during development, including console-based workflows with OpenCode, so being able to shape the site more directly in code is a big plus for us.

A lot of our motivation came from pain with WordPress plugins. Over time we ran into the usual problems:

• plugin bloat
• plugin costs
• plugins competing with each other
• conflict-prone behavior
• not being able to find the exact plugin behavior we wanted without stacking multiple tools together

At one point we even had a case where disabling a plugin still destabilized the site badly enough that the whole site crashed. That kind of experience pushed us toward looking for a system where we could own more of the implementation ourselves.

So far, EmDash has been a promising alternative for us.

What has gone well:

• the importer worked reasonably well as a starting point
• the Astro frontend is fast
• after some cleanup passes, the imported content displays well
• self-hosted ownership/operations feel simpler
• custom plugin development is actually viable

One of the first things we built was our own ICS calendar plugin for EmDash so we could replace one of the WordPress plugins we depended on:

• https://github.com/omgitsgela/emdash-plugin-ics-calendar

That was a really useful test for us because it showed that we can implement exactly the behavior we need instead of trying to force our workflow through a pile of third-party plugins.

What still needs work from our perspective:

• imported media URLs needed cleanup work after migration
• the page editing experience still feels rough in some places
• we’re still figuring out how far EmDash can go for us while it’s this young
• we’re interested in using it for more member-oriented content over time, and that part still feels exploratory

Overall, we’re not treating it as a finished decision yet, but it’s one of the most interesting WordPress alternatives we’ve tested so far, especially for a club like ours that wants to self-host, move faster, and build custom functionality without dragging around a huge plugin stack.

[RamonKaes]

I tried to create my first plugin and ran into the first limitation of the EmDash design. A “fully self-contained” plugin would only be possible if EmDash had a page injection API, which doesn't exist today.

[tableau-China]

I have deployed emdash on Online, Amazing blog platform .
but I can't publish page or article . I can edit menu, sections, tag .

[cultpodcasts]

I started an astro content site on april 1 oblivious to the emdash announcement. Intended to build very basic CMS using an Azure CosmosDB backend. Heard about the project on the 3rd. Watched the video on the 5th. Decided to try it out on the 6th. Moved implementation using Turso db into production last night. My first project using Terraform to provision entire stack, making move into Production last night a breeze. (Still not a public site. It's a greenfield news site & app using Bubblewrap)

I am super happy. Client was really interested in my workflow using AI - so I expect them to be super happy at content creation using AI prompts via MCP. It works. Some teething problems - to be expected. But very happy.

Great work CF! Super happy some Brits involved in the creation of this project. I will have to keep my ear to the ground about any MeetUps on this project in London.

[ascorbic]

Yes, all Brits here except Claude! I would like to do a meetup at some point, but not sure we have enough interest yet. Maybe tag along to another meetup.

Great to hear things are going well with your experiments!

[einfachai]

I tried it and I love it, however for me to actually use it, I would need some more documentation about the concepts and how things are intended. For example is it really not intended to create custom content types and fields in plugins? If so, why? Will taxonomies get custom fields support too? Is a roadmap planned? I think for us it would be very helpful to see your roadmap for the project.

[long202258]

I’m using EmDash to build a corporate website, and I’ve noticed that it doesn’t support sub-menus or product categories. Although it’s possible to add these manually, it requires a series of modifications. I’d prefer these features to be included by default. Even with WordPress as a corporate CMS, having to search for plugins or make modifications is rather a hassle. Thank you.

[irvingbennett]

I read about EmDash a couple of days ago and got into it right away. I was amazed that by the end of the day I had moved my WordPress blog into EmDash, all 21 years of posts and pages, plus 3 gb of images. I started from a WordPress backup that imported in less than an hour, then it gobbled all my images directly from my blog online. In less than a day the move was complete (to a test site running in wsl ubuntu).

It was all pretty straitforward, amazing. I installed version 0.3 and today they are 0.5 already, really moving along. The first problem I noticed was with the last post: it had columns and they didn't show up right (no images). Then, in the text editor, the columns just show like an icon and the can't be edited. All stuff from an early beta, but, still, amazing. I look forward to trying it again in a couple of months and see how much it has progressed. Good job!