Cloudflare launches EmDash — the 'spiritual successor' that wants to take on WordPress

Cloudflare’s recent launch of EmDash marks one of the most ambitious attempts in years to rethink the foundations of content management on the web.

WordPress has dominated the space for nearly a quarter of a century, powering over 40% of all websites and allowing millions of people and businesses to publish content online. Its success helped democratize publishing, but its architecture — first introduced 24 years ago — was designed for a very different era of the internet.

Today’s web is shaped by serverless infrastructure, distributed computing, and increasingly by AI-driven workflows, and many of WordPress’s core assumptions no longer reflect that reality.

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One of the most persistent challenges facing WordPress is security, particularly around plugins. While they have always ...