EmDash: Did Cloudflare Kill WordPress?  Oh boy, do we have a juicy topic today. Did Cloudflare just kill off WordPress with its spiritual successor called M Dash? Such a juicy topic. We're going to have all the effects today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and comment on the video. Introducing Mdash by Matt and Matt as a take on Matt reported by Matt and the Mdash logo with a cross out of the M. Very interesting stuff here. There's a big homage to WordPress in this blog post. Cloudflare, if you don't know, big technology company, they do a lot of stuff. started off with like DNS protection, then some domain registration, then a whole bunch of other stuff that powers the internet. They are now uh the owners of Astro, which I covered in the last video, which has been on the hype cycle. And again, I don't mean hype in a bad way. I just mean like a lot of people talking about it, a lot of people interested in these alternatives, especially AI forward alternatives to WordPress, right? And you can go back and check out my video if you want some more details on that. They have now built Mdash on top of Astro. Let's dive into some of the stuff in this blog post. So, let's focus in on how they define Mdash. Our name for this new CMS is Mdash. We think of it as a spiritual successor to WordPress. It's written entirely in Typescript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandbox and can run in their own isolate via dynamic workers, solving the fundamental security problem with WordPress plug-in architecture. Under the hood, MD is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content driven websites. It's M Dash's fully open source MIT license and available on GitHub. And you can deploy M dash.10 preview to your own Cloudflare account or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta. I'm not going to cover the deployment in this video. We are going to take a look at a base installation in a moment, but it was fairly painless. If you've used Cloudflare before, it is a very similar tree of forms that you're submitting some content on. Connects up to your GitHub account and it deploys it creating all of the assets and infrastructure you need on the Cloudflare side. Okay, but let's get into the nitty-gritty of some of this stuff. What has WordPress accomplished? The story of WordPress is a triumph of open source that has enabled publishing at a scale never seen before. Few projects have had the same recognizable impact on the generation raised on the internet. The contributors to WordPress core and its many thousands of plugins and theme developers have built a platform that democratized publishing for millions, many lives and livelihoods being transformed by this ubiquitous software. It it is a great homage like I said before like we are saying, hey, WordPress has done a great job. I assume they didn't want to come out swinging like a lot of other CMSs have in the past, which is here's all the negatives of WordPress. There's nothing good here. Come see our stuff. So again, I am looking at this like, is the rug going to get pulled out? Is this an April Fool's joke? Well, I guess we'll find out in a day or two if this thing is actually going to be continue to be developed and adopted. There'll be some GitHub links that I'll I'll provide below. So, this is good that they have recognized this and and I'm just going to get this out of the way first. What WordPress has accomplished is pretty amazing. everyone top to bottom from Matt to automatic to core contributors to community contributors to plug-in ecosystem, theme ecosystem, hosting providers, users, volunteers at word camps, anyone who has contributed in any way, at least in my opinion, has given to WordPress in some shape or form. This is very difficult to compete against, right? And we're going to look at some of the mdash experience in the back end in a moment. But this is the thing that a lot of people have a hard time challenging with WordPress is that community feel. This is something that I think is uh paramount for WordPress to focus on. I think this is something that has really driven the adoption of WordPress. Not just leadership, not just Matt, not just a plugin, not just a theme. It is a entire body that has built and elevated WordPress to where it is today. This is why we can sit here and debate technologies and frameworks and should we have AI, should we not have AI, post types, content types, all of these things, but really it is how are we all working together for this thing? Because without the community certainly WordPress does not excel or continue to serve such a huge market share throughout the globe, right? the the community. It is a collective of people who sometimes have a tugof-war with each other, but at the end of the day, have something that's open source, number one, and number two, something that can help with their own livelihoods, brand, mission, nonprofit, or cupcake business. All right, so the next thing that they get into is a lot more technical. I'm not going to break this down because I've only been looking at this thing for like 30 minutes. What they're saying is, here's a typical WordPress installation. We know the problems that we have with WordPress, especially in a shared hosting environment. Got themes, we've got plugins, we've got multiple providers, we've got multiple people accessing this thing. Allegedly, Mdash installation is isolating all of this stuff thanks to Cloudflare and thanks to some of the infrastructure that Cloudflare has in its place. We read earlier that this could be moved around to any hosting provider, presumably if you can run a Node.js server or something similar. This is where I find solutions like this on that hype cycle because yes, these are really cool to look at and play with in through the lens of AI like we have today. But the other strength on a technical level of WordPress is that you can pick it up and plop it onto one of the 3,000 web hosts throughout the world who offer WordPress support. A lot of the technically advanced folks out there who have switched to remember Jamstack. Does everybody remember Jamstack? who have have moved to one of these like nodebased solutions or JavaScript first solutions. They're great. They're fantastic, but you still have a technical acumen that you need to get these things running. Hosting is not as ubiquitous for these types of technologies. I mean maybe we see the increase of it because of everything that's happening with AI but that old lethargic MySQL PHP HTML CSS with a nice portion of JavaScript these days can be forklift to a lot of providers whether you like it or not whether it's performant or not it's giving people the ability to move around and I think that that is a hard thing to compete with against WordPress. Let's continue. The blog post does get into talking about again solving the plug-in security means solving the marketplace lockin. It's funny that they call it a marketplace. I guess anybody could call WordPress.org anything these days. I mean, we're technically finding out the definition of that as we speak. They site that at the time of this writing the review Q is 800 plugins long, although I thought that was recently taken down, so I don't know, or brought down to a a lower queue and takes at least two weeks to traverse, which is what kind of embellishing. Like I mean 800 plugins in line taking 2 weeks not a bad thing. I wait for a half a pound of sliced turkey at my market uh longer than that. So the vulnerability surface area of WordPress plugins is so wide that in practice all parties rely on marketplace reputation ratings and reviews because WordPress plugins run in the same execution context as WordPress itself. They're so deeply intertwined with WordPress code. Some argue they must carry forward WordPress GPL license. And we they continue to break down like how they're trying to solve this with with Mdash. But again, it is that ecosystem on the technical level again that has allowed WordPress to flourish because it is open and people can develop anything and largely you can just go ahead and install things through a browser which could be good or bad. That has been a thing that has allowed WordPress to create such a large market. You could argue that till the cows come home. Not the two cows, but the cows. You can argue that till the cows come home. But I think that it is a positive for WordPress. This was really cool and we're going to dive into the example really quick. So MD uses a pass keybased authentication by default, meaning there are no passwords to leak and no brute force factors to defend against. User management includes familiar role-based access control out of the box, administrators, editors, authors, and contributors. Uh each scoped strictly to actions that they need. This was pretty cool. When you do the installation, it is reminiscent of the five minute install which I talked about in the other video. It was really quick. Site title, name, email, set up the pass key in your favorite password app, and it just worked. So, that was really cool and really quick, but then we get into remembering that one, is this a April Fool's joke? Two, this is just point one, and we can see why. All right, here we are in the dashboard of Mdash. It's going to be a weird thing to keep saying. Look, the TLDDR of this experience is it's super sparse. It's super basic, but it's also 0.1. And do I have to keep saying it might be an April Fool's joke? I have one basic post that I published. Let's take a look at this. We'll click on to my first blog post. I have a featured image there. I put put in a bunch of text. I can just tell you, and I'm not going to spend time breaking this all down because again, one, it's super early, and two, it is literally nowhere near the content building experience that you have in WordPress. Let's not even talk about building websites uh with page builders or blocks. Let's just talk about writing content, publishing content, managing blocks of content and patterns. Uh it's nowhere near this. In fact, I'm surprised Cloudflare could have forked Gutenberg, right? They could have forked their own version of Gutenberg or just use Gutenberg in this project and then contributed back to Gutenberg. It's probably something that Matt was saying if this in fact is a true thing. Put a bunch of text here. Let's take a look at what this looks like. It's not very pretty. I'm going to hit preview and see if this pulls into the front end of the site. And it does. Here it is. My first blog post. Very simple, very basic. This is just a default theme which is largely just like a a blog type of site. You can click on edit and you can edit in some of this content here which is I believe like a plugin that Astro can support. Fact check me in the comments. But it is kind of nice to be able to just be looking at the site here and editing content. I do not believe I can edit images. So that just brings me right back into the post. Right. So now I can come here and finish editing the post. Again, you're not going to be lost by doing something like this. If you are somebody who wants to tinker and be sort of ahead of the curve and just try things out like me, you know what you're looking at here. Post editor, a bunch of meta content or metadata that you need to adjust. The media assets and everything. The nice thing is it's deploying all of this infrastructure on Cloudflare. So, it's like a one-click button. Super easy. Again, I think if you like Cloudflare, which I do, you're going to be at home. If you're trying to peel this away and move somewhere else, I don't know what that process looks like in terms of like now I have to move my bucket of assets and of course the code and and content and all that stuff. Everything else is pretty straightforward. You kind of understand what they're doing here. Widgets is to me this is like a red flag. Maybe a April Fool's joke. Like I going back to widgets. My brain simply does not understand that that we'd be going back to something that has like a widget area and we're defining widgets. But, you know, it makes sense because that's where WordPress came from, but I think we're well beyond that these days for better or worse. Trying to wrap up here and not walk through every inch of this M dash demo. content types is one of those things where yes, by far this is what we've always wanted in WordPress and something that we've had in Drupal since Drupal four or five when I started using it. Certainly is Drupal 5, which is I don't know 18 years ago at this point. Being able to define your core post types and core fields that are associated with that post type uh makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. I mean, I think a lot of content management systems do that. I'm not here to debate that, but it's it's here and it's in M dash. So, if you are somebody who has a bunch of content that you need to organize in a true content management style right out of the box with no additional plugins, boom, here you go. It's right here. But I will stop for a second and say like when you're looking at this UI, just like you saw in the post editor, we're not like amazed. Like this is not amazing. This is not like a beautiful experience. You could argue if you need a beautiful experience, but it certainly isn't when you're working with it. But you have your core components here. I'm really interested to see how the whole like plugin and theme and marketplace shakes out. Obviously, this is day one. This is like hour four that it's been out. There's nothing here. It ships with m- forms, which you know, my day job is at Gravity Forms. And I don't think I am, you know, out of work just yet. This is creating a form here. We'll just add a field. And this is, you know, reminiscence of forms back in 2002, right? Like when you're building a form builder. Nothing nothing crazy here. And I wonder just Oh, yeah. We do have turn style integration. So hopefully, you know, you'd see a lot of this stuff start to improve. Or in fact, maybe not. Hopefully. Let's let's let the form stuff suck for a long time. I'll be happy with that. A lot of other interesting things here. You can go and download your site. So this will be what I wrap up on. I'm just going to put in one of my blog WordPress blogs. We'll check the site. And this is kind of cool. Gives you a little report. Hey, there's 468 posts, 12 pages, 972 media, probably under the hood. This is maybe knocking on the door of API, possibly the RSS feed. This is probably cached, but when I ran it the first time, it didn't take very long for it to report back on this. Again, speaking about the UI, it's pretty awful. This is got a huge contrast issue right here. But it says down with a little magical AI SVG, for the best import experience, install the M-exporter plugin for your WordPress site. Oddly enough, it doesn't link to it here, but if you just search for M-Exporter plugin, you can find it on GitHub, and I will leave it in the comments below so that you can see that or upload your export file from WordPress right here. I haven't tried that yet, but I suspect that the plugin will do that from your WordPress site to this site when you do a search like this. Other than that, everything else is pretty straightforward in terms of what you're looking for in the core of a CMS site name, site title, users, uh, email address, all that stuff. I'm not going to go into that. Very, very early days. I'm much more interested to see, of course, how this project uh improves. Much more interested to see how WordPress improves. again forward- facing with the community. On our podcast of the WP Minute, we just had Mary Hubard on to talk about her position in sort of leading the WordPress community. Eric Caravak did a fantastic interview with her. Still skeptical of that work and how we're moving forward and working with each other and not just against each other in the sort of like automatic versus WP Engine versus community and how we're all getting through this stuff. Um, it is crucial that the folks in the WordPress community do work together to save the platform, if you will, and work together to keep folks adopting WordPress. As I said in the other video, there could be a world, I mean, there is a world where WordPress adoption does decline and we're just losing out to maybe a certain section of sites that is now being served through AI builder programs or from bigger brands like a Cloudflare who's building off of Astro and the framework and working with infrastructure at scale. So, we could be losing ground to that, but I think that's okay. I think what we end up finding is WordPress finds its own footing, its own brand identity, which we've been searching for for 20 years in the face of competition through folks like Cloudflare and AI. Anyway, I'm done. Leave a comment below. Thumbs up if you like the video. Subscribe to the channel if you want more. I don't think they Thanosed us yet. 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