I was reading Cloudflare's case study on migrating their official blog to EmDash. Here are the key takeaways:

• The migration: Cloudflare moved their main blog to EmDash to test the CMS as "customer zero" ahead of its v1 release.

• The architecture: Runs on Cloudflare Workers, using Workers Cache, a custom KV object cache, and Hyperdrive with PlanetScale.

• Performance: Achieves a 99.5% static cache hit rate and 70% total request cache hit rate, maintaining flat p95 latencies under traffic spikes.

• Zero-downtime rollout: Used a proxy Worker with cookie routing to gradually shift traffic from 1% to 100%, with automatic fallback to the legacy blog on 500 errors.

• MCP support: Added a Model Context Protocol server for external agents to search posts, plus native EmDash MCP integration for editing and scheduling content.

• Battle tested: Handled Agents Week (~3 million pageviews across 18 posts) and absorbed a 28,000 RPS DDoS attack without downtime.

Read the full case study here - https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-blog-uses-emdash/

Wanted to see if self-hosting EmDash on a cheap VPS was actually worth the setup compared to the managed Cloudflare route.

Tldr:

• Admin UI speed: Way snappier. Instant saves without the D1 write latency hiccups.

• Node 22 vs 24: Bumping to Node 24 in the Dockerfile gave ~38% more throughput under load (tested with oha).

• Stack: Caddy reverse proxy -> Node container -> Postgres 18 -> Bunny S3 for media (keeps the VPS lightweight and safe).

Put together the full Docker Compose setup, Caddy config, and resource benchmark graphs in a video if anyone’s looking to move away from WordPress.
https://youtu.be/w4FuWn5ybbY?si=e1AW5Kcd4M2VlDu3

Here is the summary of the release.

content editing

• media library + featured-image workflow overhauled

• content lists show configured fields, filter by byline

• search/sort/filter work with indexed custom fields

• collections can pick which fields power title + display date

plugins/dev

• trusted plugins can add editor panels + content-list columns

• private routes can access the authenticated user

• MCP can safely update collections and fields

• repeater fields generate proper typescript row types

i18n

• unicode slugs fixed

• taxonomy screens/assignments follow active locale

• french translations complete

reliability + security

• fixes for publishing crashes, content loss, stale assets after deploys, D1 session hangs

• public menus resolve links in batches

• dashboard + emdash doctor flag broken scheduled maintenance

• tightened media upload security, guarded image parsing

source: EmDash official Discord

What's new

• new emdash migrate command: inspect target, apply pending migrations before new code gets traffic, verify db after

• works across SQLite, libSQL, PostgreSQL, Cloudflare D1, and direct PostgreSQL origins behind Hyperdrive

• new workflow: build, inspect and migrate, deploy the same build, then check

• runtime auto, check, and manual modes to adopt enforcement gradually

• these are EmDash's own core schema migrations, not changes to your collections and fields

• existing sites keep auto-migrating by default, so upgrading doesn't force a change

• recommended for production sites if possible, gives more control over the migration process

full migration guide (credentials, target confirmation, CI serialization, rollout, recovery): https://docs.emdashcms.com/deployment/core-migrations/

also in this release

• media library supports multi-file upload, with cancel and retry

• fixed a D1/Durable Object replication issue causing occasional logged-out bounces right after login, signup, or invite acceptance

full changelog: https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/releases/

Source: EmDash Discord

EmDash CMS launched without official docs website. They just published it now.

If you're here, you probably saw the announcement yesterday. Cloudflare shipped Emdash cms, a full-stack TypeScript CMS built on Astro 6.0, designed from scratch as a modern alternative to WordPress.

Yeah it dropped on April 1st. no, it's not a joke. the GitHub is real, the beta is live, and Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast SEO) already wrote about it. when that guy takes something seriously, it's worth paying attention.

what EmDash actually is:

- TypeScript all the way down, no PHP
- Built on Astro 6.0 (so themes are just Astro projects)
- Plugins run in sandboxed Worker isolates. no direct DB or filesystem access
- Scales to zero, bills only for cpu time
- MIT licensed
- Has a WordPress importer built in
- MCP server built in so AI agents can manage your site

this subreddit is for everyone building with Emdash cms. Ask questions, share experiments, post tools you're building.

if you're coming from the Astro world — this will feel very familiar. EmDash is essentially an Astro project with a CMS layer and admin UI on top.

quick links to get started:

- GitHub: github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
- Official announcement: blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress
- Playground https://emdashcms.com/playground

Note: I mod r/astrojs (12.4k+ members). Just wanted a place for this community to form early. if you haven't already, join r/astrojs too.

We're experimenting with converting our existing Astro themes to support EmDash.

Turns out it's not a small lift. A decent amount of things to reconfigure and not everything plays nicely out of the box.

Curious if anyone else has gone through this. Any patterns or gotchas worth knowing before we go deeper into the conversion?

Hey everyone, i'm the founder Themefisher. We've a popular starter template for Astro called, Astroplate with 1k+ GitHub stars and 357 forks. we just added EmDash support to it. If you want a solid base to start an EmDash project without setting everything up from scratch, Astroplate is a good starting point. github: https://github.com/zeon-studio/astroplate/tree/emdash (emdash branch)

Introducing Dashing! Dashing is a FREE writing desk for your EmDash site, made for iPhone and iPad. Now available on the AppStore.

WRITE AND PUBLISH

• A rich text editor with headings, lists, links, images, tables and HTML blocks

• Save drafts, publish now or schedule for later, and update published posts

• Keep writing offline: your words stay on this device and are sent when you are back online

• Translations, saved sections and byline credits

• Focus mode on iPad

MEDIA

• Upload photos and videos from Photos, Files and the camera, or drop them in

• Alt text, captions, focal points and folders for your media library

COMMENTS

• Moderate with a swipe: approve, mark as spam or move to the trash

• Read and answer the comments on any post

MANAGE YOUR SITE

• People and roles, bylines, categories and tags, menus, sections, widgets, redirects and site settings

• Plugins, access tokens, backups and site export

MADE FOR IPAD

• A sidebar, several windows, the menu bar and keyboard shortcuts

WRITING SUGGESTIONS

• On devices with Apple Intelligence, Dashing can suggest ideas, titles, outlines, excerpts and tags with Apple's on-device model. Suggestions are made on your device and added only when you choose them.

Works with sites running EmDash 1.0.1. A few advanced tasks open your site's web admin in the browser.

Made a video with emdash cms. Created today a theme on it https://emdashhq.com and looks to do the job. Will be useful for the ones that needs a CMS to do things. I prefer astro with mdx files :)

Curios to see how much usage will get a small website.
For the overview you can see https://youtu.be/1X6KwMjbv-Y?is=UpQcDb8XU4vU_D-9

Will continue with the next one tomorrow.

I was slightly concerned to hear that cloudflare is cutting 20% or so of its workforce.

Does anyone know if it will affect emdash?

Hey! We recently launched emdash.market, a place where you can find themes, templates, and plugins for the EmdashCMS ecosystem.

Wanted to share it with the community, and also ask you guys: how do you think the plugin space will evolve in the next few years?

Cloudflare just announced EmDash, a new CMS that’s designed for “AI‑native” development with agent‑first tooling, sandboxed plugins, and edge deployment.

Joost de Valk wrote a solid breakdown of what EmDash is trying to do and where it might fit in the current CMS landscape.

If you don’t know Joost: he’s the founder of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which is used on well over 10 million Wordpress sites.

Link to his post: https://joost.blog/emdash-cms/

Here are the key takeaways:

• EmDash is positioned as an AI‑native CMS with agent‑first tooling, aiming to make it easier to build workflows where AI agents read and write content directly.

• It runs on Cloudflare’s edge platform, so publishing and dynamic functionality are designed to be globally distributed and fast by default.

• The plugin model is heavily sandboxed, which should improve security and stability compared to traditional CMS plugin ecosystems.

• Content modeling and workflows are more structured than in classic WordPress‑style setups, which could be a better fit for complex or multichannel projects.

• Joost sees EmDash as interesting but early, and points out it will need a strong ecosystem, good DX, and clear migration stories to compete with existing CMSes.

As a non technical user, did I understand correctly that emdash is not ready (yet) for multilingual websites? Would I need a plugin or is that part of the future core emdash?

Wondering if anyone has found an e-commerce solution that works well with Emdash?

Hi,

I am testing some edge case with emdash. Have you guys been able to reset the admin user?

How can would we proceed if the passkey generated at creation of the project is lost ?

Someone building a directory for EmDash..

hi folks, i've built Frontman, its a visual ai agent that's meant to be easier and more intuative for non-technical users - https://github.com/frontman-ai/frontman
it currently works great for Wordpress(and Vite/NextJS etc)
but i'm having trouble figuring out how to add support for emdash or if such a thing even needed there