EmDash: The WordPress Successor That Fixes Plugin Security

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