GoKawiilis a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Cloudflare, the cloud provider that connects millions of sites to the internet, wants to “fix” another digital giant: WordPress. It announced a new open-source system, called EmDash, that’s supposed to address the “core problems that WordPress cannot solve” — and they want to do it by allowing AI agents to take control of your website.
Though it’s still in early access, EmDash is already causing a stir in the WordPress community, and not just because its interface looks like WordPress with a facelift. Cloudflare is calling EmDash the “spiritual successor” of WordPress — something WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has already refuted in a blog post about the new platform. “Please don’t claim to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit,” Mullenweg writes. “I think EmDash was created to sell more Cloudflare services.”
Other members of the WordPress community have jumped online to pick apart EmDash as well, while also calling attention to ways that the WordPress project should be improved — especially when it comes to issues surrounding architecture, security, and AI adoption.
In its announcement, Cloudflare claims to have rebuilt the open-source WordPress project “from the ground up,” offering a built-in model context protocol (MCP) server, which allows large language models (LLMs) to connect and interact with the platform’s documentation. It runs on Astro, Cloudflare’s LLM-friendly web building framework, and uses TypeScript, a programming language that AI agents can better understand. EmDash even supports x402, a tool that web publishers can use to make AI crawlers pay to access their content.
Brian Coords, a developer advocate at WordPress.com owner Automattic, notes that one of EmDash’s strengths is in the speed at which you can set up a website, saying, “Getting from zero to a basic design is fast. I mean, really fast.”
EmDash’s interface looks a lot like WordPress. Image: Cloudflare
But it “feels a bit vibe-coded,” Coords writes. Mullenweg echoes this, writing on his blog that the interface “is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-WordPress sorta-not,” adding that he knows “it wasn’t a weekend vibecode project, but it has some of that smell.” Mullenweg admits that EmDash’s AI-powered skills feature is a nice touch, but he doesn’t get into the deeper issues holding WordPress back — something that other members of the community have been vocal about in light of EmDash’s launch.
Joost de Valk, the creator of the popular Yoast WordPress plugin, calls EmDash “the most interesting thing to happen to content management in years,” as it’s built to work with support for AI agents and comes with structured content that “machines can parse and manipulate easily.” In his post about EmDash, de Valk brings up the structural issues with WordPress that the project continues to treat “as cosmetic.”
De Valk references a post from WordPress developer Hendrik Luehrsen, who writes that EmDash “exposes an old weakness” in WordPress’s current editor, Gutenberg, which stores data in an HTML format. Luehrsen argues that this structure becomes a problem when developers have to rework content, process it through different interfaces, or move it into other systems.
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