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On April 1st, Cloudflare team announced beta CMS, EmDash.

r/Wordpress folks on Reddit were all over about it, and that’s how I found out too. A few days after their announcement, our CEO Matt posts EmDash Feedback post. I think WordPress community secretly long for dramas, so I’m sure lots of people expected to hear from Matt. And he delivered.

I thought Matt’s take was something many would agree on and share sentiment with. Anyone can say anything to sell you things.

But I just want to say…

I’ve personally been looking for alternative to WordPress myself, and I’ve looked into so many tools or platforms like:

• Airtable / Notion / Google sheet as CMS → ‘Sync to frontend’ tool/platform
• Other Saas CMS blogging tools
• Other WooCommerce alt plugins or platforms

I can proactively dislike WordPress with passion too

I would not say ‘hate’, because that’s a strong word. But I would say I had a very strong feeling that is close to that when I was actively trying to convince myself that ‘there’s gotta be something else.’

And my main reasons why I always look were because:

• Hosting WordPress sites is relatively expensive, and a lot of work just by itself
• Coming to WordPress admin area to post is too much (well there is a way to post via email by default)
• Managing WooCommerce products is too much (sure, there are tools out there to auto-sync, etc, but it’s not built-in)
• Designing takes too long and it feels limiting

It really comes down to how I feel less empowered by WordPress and WooCommerce just in general than anything else as a user.

Biggest pain points : Design

The biggest bottleneck was the ability to design for me. As a life long student of arts, I felt restricted by the very tools that were supposed to give me agency to design freely.

As a non-coder, one of my passion hobbies was to test various page builders for WordPress. I’ve tried:

• Oxygen
• Bootstrap
• Elementor
• Bricks
• Divi
• Random CodeCanyon theme with built-in page builder
• Random page builder (LTD)
• Hostinger’s page builder (Zyro)

I really tried so many of them, and none of them gave me the spark.

Every single one of them just reminded me that I need to adopt to the tools rather than tools giving me the freedom I sought after. I also don’t like thinking in boxes/rigid designs, and all these tools only give me boxes.

What issue EmDash is solving?

And honestly, EmDash UI is just triggering to me. It’s so rigid, I feel like it’s another trap that is going to limit my ability.

Jokes aside (okay, I wasn’t joking), I am not sure what problems EmDash is solving when I can already use WordPress x Claude Code, and I can build sites without any plugins.

With Claude Code development in mind, most of the plugins can be replaced with just coding:

• Page builder
• ACF
• Pop-ups
• Forms

While they moved fast to build this, the world is about to move on and find ways to adopt.

AI is going to be a survival skill. And platforms that can be understood most by AI with less mistakes is going to be valued.

I’ve been thinking a lot about open source projects, and how empowering they are in the era of AI. The more AI is familiar with the code, the better outcome it will be.

Even with no coding knowledge, someone like myself can spin up a site and build something real.

I work in Woo support every day for the past 5 years (!), so I need to come clean first that I’m definitely biased. I believe deeply in the power of open source and in what WooCommerce enables.

But also… I have so many gaslighting experiences with the products.

Does WooCommerce gaslight you too?

You don’t know how shipping works? Too bad!

Let’s just put it out there. We know user experience of WooCommerce is bad.

But then I must also point out: the mess doesn’t actually belong to WooCommerce, and we are mostly projecting the day to day commerce struggles onto WooCommerce. Calling it out “Why can’t WooCommerce just work to make commerce work?”

Commerce is messy because human world is messy—and regulations built around commerce are messy.

Commerce is simply too complicated

I specialize in shipping and tax products within Woo as a support engineer.

UPS, USPS, FedEx, Royal Mail, Canada Mail, Australia Post… Not only the regional shipping carrier dynamic, but global shipping regulation wants me dead. That complexity is the reality merchants face day-to-day. No matter how much you try to simplify the tool, there are always new rules, edge cases, and regulations.

One time, Woo merchant reached out about the FedEx Shipping Method extension and asked:

“Why aren’t freight rates returning to Hawaii and Alaska, even though that’s possible?”

Well I had no idea, so I called the FedEx API support. Their answer:

• They supported it on SOAP (now legacy)
• But not on their newer API
• Then they said “We don’t know if we are gonna roll that out yet.”

Ummmmmmmm… okay…

Love and hate or mostly hate

It’s not WooCommerce that’s messy. In fact, WooCommerce is built to hold the complexities of human world.

There isn’t perfect tool, because every business operates differently. And there won’t be any platform that just works for every edge case.

Each business is operating with platform and tools in mind. People always adapt.