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.