Cloudflare unveils EmDash, a CMS that it claims is the spiritual successor to WordPress.

Cloudflare has announced EmDash , a new

GitHub - emdash-cms/emdash · GitHub
https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/

Cloudflare Announces EmDash As Open-Source 'Spiritual Successor' To WordPress - Phoronix
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cloudflare-EmDash

WordPress, born in 2003, is the 'world's most popular CMS,' and even more than 20 years later, as of April 2026, it is still used by over 40% of the world's websites. However, it's time for an upgrade to keep up with the changes that have occurred over the past 20 years, and that's why Cloudflare developed EmDash as its 'spiritual successor.'

As befits its claim of being a 'spiritual successor,' EmDash is designed to be compatible with WordPress's features. On the other hand, it is written in TypeScript without using any WordPress code and is available under the MIT license, so it is expected to encourage participation, adaptation, and extension by a wider range of developers.

Cloudflare pointed out that WordPress plugins are structurally insecure because they are PHP scripts that directly hook into and add or modify functionality. EmDash improves on this point, with plugins running in their own isolated sandbox. Furthermore, they can only execute actions explicitly declared in the manifest. Plugins can also have their own licenses independent of EmDash, making the marketplace more open.

Furthermore, EmDash supports x402, a neutral standard for online payments, so anyone with an EmDash site can charge for access to content without subscriptions or special engineering work. It makes doing business easy.

If you already have a WordPress site, you can export the WXR file or use the exporter plugin in EmDash to import your site into EmDash in just a few minutes.

EmDash has released a preview version, v0.1.0.