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EmDash 1.0: a stable CMS with sandboxed plugins and a decentralized registry

Cloudflare Blog ★★★★ View Markdown
#cloudflare#web#security

Hi everyone, Shii-chan here! Today's news is a 1.0 release of a CMS.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Blog announced EmDash 1.0, a free, open source CMS built for Astro and designed for developers, editors, and AI agents. It started as an April Fools' joke and grew into a production-ready platform.

The story so far

WordPress plugins can have unrestricted access to the database. EmDash aims to change that.

What changes

EmDash plugins run in isolated environments with capabilities they declare and users approve. Without explicit permission, they can't access site content, media, user data, or secrets.

Dive Deep

Here are the technical points:

  • Architecture: built for Astro, with agent access through an API, a CLI, and an MCP server. It deploys to Cloudflare Workers and to Node.js using the workerd runtime. It was tested on the Cloudflare Blog at 5,000 requests per second of capacity
  • Sandbox: uses Dynamic Workers on Cloudflare, and the same isolation works on Node.js deployments
  • Decentralized plugin registry: built on the AT Protocol used by Bluesky. Atmosphere accounts give publishers a portable identity, and signed Merkle Search Trees handle verification. Free plugins are supported now, with paid plugins planned. Automated moderation runs on Workers AI

The community includes 175+ contributors, 1,800+ commits, translations into 25 languages, and 800+ members on Discord. Partners include Lexington Themes (44 Astro themes with EmDash variants), Urumi (building an eCommerce plugin), Empress (a multisite platform), and Avulux (migrated from WordPress).

There's also EmDash Build (alpha), an open source AI site builder where agents create sites with the full stack: Astro pages, a database, media storage, and an admin interface. Each project gets its own Cloudflare Sandbox container with git commit tracking.

You can create a new site with this command. The license is MIT.

npm create emdash@latest

Wrap-up

  • EmDash, an open source CMS for Astro, reaches stable 1.0
  • Plugins run in a sandbox with approved capabilities
  • A decentralized registry on the AT Protocol keeps publishers in control
  • EmDash Build (alpha) brings AI site building

This is for anyone looking for a CMS for Astro, or worried about plugin safety!

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