ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode of This Week in NET, host João Tomé is joined by Matt “TK” Taylor (Senior Product Manager) and Matt Kane (Senior Principal Systems Engineer) to discuss EmDash, a new CMS launched by Cloudflare as a modern, serverless alternative inspired by WordPress.
Built on Astro and designed for today’s developer workflows, EmDash combines the familiarity of traditional CMS platforms with a modern architecture: serverless deployment, TypeScript throughout, and a plugin system designed to solve one of WordPress’s biggest challenges — security.
The conversation explores why plugin vulnerabilities account for the vast majority of WordPress security issues, and how EmDash addresses that by running plugins in sandboxed Worker isolates with tightly scoped permissions. Matt and Matt also discuss how AI agents were used during development, why the project is MIT licensed, and how the CMS is designed from the ground up to work with AI agents through MCP and structured content.
Later in the episode we see the EmDash playground, how WordPress sites can be imported in minutes, and how developers can start building plugins and extensions today.
More info:
Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
Try out the EmDash admin interface here: https://emdashcms.com/playground
⏱️ Timestamps
00:45 — Intro: EmDash launch and April 1 announcement
02:09 — What EmDash is and why Cloudflare built it
04:07 — Why WordPress architecture struggles on modern infrastructure
06:30 — Scaling storage, media, and modern hosting models
07:00 — The plugin ecosystem: WordPress’s strength and weakness
08:19 — Matt Taylor’s background in CMS and media platforms
09:03 — Matt Kane’s work with Astro and Gatsby
11:21 — How the idea for EmDash started inside the Astro community
13:36 — Building the CMS with AI agents
17:21 — Sandbox plugins with Cloudflare Dynamic Workers
19:17 — Solving the plugin security problem
22:16 — Why EmDash is MIT licensed
25:52 — Early feedback from Yoast and the WordPress ecosystem
27:05 — Designing a CMS for AI agents and MCP workflows
30:43 — Demo: the EmDash playground and dashboard
33:22 — Flexible content types and built-in SEO
35:05 — Editing directly on the live page
37:18 — Early community feedback and plugins already appearing
39:03 — x402 and the future of agent-era monetization
40:17 — SEO architecture and plugin extensibility
41:43 — What’s next for EmDash
