EmDash: A Fresh Take on CMS | Hacker News Reader

EmDash: A Fresh Take on CMS

maciekpalmowski.dev

60 pointstaubek14 comments

Embarrassingly badly generated article, with no real takeaway other than "I let an LLM dig into the code, here's what words it chose to describe EmDash".

> Joost put it well:

> It’s not a CMS with AI features bolted on. It’s a CMS where AI agents are first-class builders.

Joost asked ChatGPT what he should say about the CMS, and you felt like it was a good quote.

> Why I won’t use it

> I migrated to Astro partly to get away from the CMS.

Well then you never needed a CMS in the first place? I also don't need use a CMS for my site, but I still maintain a CMS for customers because they do need it.

> Does it solve the right problem?

This is the only thing I cared about from this article, and the answer is [bag of words]. Are people really this desperate to put their names on new tech? Is it an "I want to be included!" mindset that gets people to prompt an hour of their life away?

> Astro itself wasn’t an obvious success from day one.

Astro is just the framework they built on, what does this sentence have to do with EmDash? I'm so confused about what this article is trying to tell me.

Also, how come you did not write anything about what it was like when WordPress had just released? I'm sure there are enough people who can help out with that. Did it have competitors? I wouldn't know, I was eating sand when it came out.

To say Astro wasn't a success from day one is a truism. No JavaScript frameworks have been an obvious success from day one. How could they be? Even very well-designed and innovative frameworks and libraries struggle to gain adoption in such a crowded space where tooling as significant as a framework has major inertia. It really is a bunch of words.

It's on the front page right now below this link but just for anyone looking later:

EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602832

The author notes that their website is a result of static generation, while EmDash needs a server beside an HTTP server and a bunch of static files.

It's partly a fair point. Anything that does not dynamically change with each reload should be generated a a static file, and served as such. When the backing data change via the admin interface, then the page should re-generate. I suppose it's the proper caching approach, and I assume any sane CMS does this now (yes, even Wordpress).

But what a static site cannot do is user-specific content. And EmDash has a elaborate structure of user access levels, various auth methods, etc. Once you have to have a user session, there's no way around having an application that handles this. The simplest example is having a comments section.

You can use page fragments to get close enough. I hacked this together in Varnish with custom headers handled by the backend before it was an actual feature. A bit of a pain but eminently doable, even years ago

I'm developing Vvveb CMS and WordPress is very inspiring, the standard to which everyone compares in the industry.

One of the reason WordPress is so ubiquitous is that it's very easy to host and it doesn't need advanced technical knowledge.

PHP hosting is very cheap and WordPress installation is very easy, it's just one click in some hosting dashboards.

The Javascript ecosystem is complex, you need to be a developer and have access to command line to install most Javascript CMSes and need a vps or more expensive hosting.

givan's point about PHP hosting being cheap and frictionless is true in most markets, but it breaks down once you factor in where the server actually sits. Most affordable shared hosting — even from providers popular in East Africa — routes traffic through data centers in Europe or the US. For users on 3G connections in Nairobi, that adds 300-500ms before a single byte loads, which no amount of caching fully fixes. The "cheap WordPress hosting" calculation looks very different when your audience is 8000km from the server.

EmDash on Workers doesn't solve the content editor experience problem (that's real and unsolved), but the performance and cost math genuinely changes in markets where Cloudflare has local infrastructure and affordable traditional hosting doesn't. There's a related thread up on HN right now that goes into the Astro + D1 + R2 stack from exactly this angle — worth a look if the emerging market performance question interests you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702649

Neither the "Cloudflare’s own announcement" nor the "Joost’s take" links point to the right URL, should be lower case.

Thanks. I realized I was writing "emdash" and when I fixed it, I fixed a bit too much.

Emdash has nothing in common worh wordpress. There are no blocks

Anything that challenges wordpress is positive.

That said, unless they get a good ecosystem of free plugins I don't see it going far.

Another slop blog post in HN top, not surprising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com