WordPress / EmDash
All good things...
Yesterday was April 1st so I was expecting a few April fools jokes to pop up in my timeline.
What I was not expecting was for Cloudflare to announce that they had built a “spiritual successor” for WordPress using Astro as a foundation.
This news came as a genuine surprise. Not only have I spent a significant portion of my working life using WordPress, I’ve also been in the process of moving all of my existing projects on to Astro.
It came as a shock when Astro announced recently that the project had been acquired by Cloudflare but I never expected this.
I’ve not had chance to actually try it out for myself just yet, but from first glance, it looks really interesting. For a start it’s written in TypeScript, a language I’ve come to use for everything. The irony is I only jumped from PHP to JavaScript and then TypeScript when WordPress adopted the awful Gutenberg editor. A moment when for me at least, Automattic finally lost the plot (and many of it’s more technical fans).
In the announcement post (which is long and really worth a read), the authors make a big deal out of the terrible security problems caused by WordPress plugins, and rightly so.
It’s interesting that they have decided to use Astro as the foundation layer for this, and they specifically mention the new live loaders that were released with Astro 6.0. I’ve not had chance to try those out yet, but for me the power of Astro content collections has been in their ability to work across Markdown and MDX files that can be easily committed to git. I guess this is more about serving the less technical market segment that traditionally uses WordPress so it makes perfect sense.
All in all, this is an exciting development. Open source, serverless and secure. Written in Typescript and leveraging Astro. What’s not to like.
The final kicker is the explicit inclusion of a tool called wp-emdash that will allow existing WordPress sites to be imported into EmDash via the REST API. This really is a gamechanger. A cursory look at the docs shows it supports posts, pages, custom post types, ACF fields, media, and SEO data.
There is a huge industry that has grown up around WordPress and this announcement has just caused an earthquake right underneath it. I am really glad that I made the switch when I did, and I can’t wait to dive into EmDash.
