I Can't Believe Cloudflare Actually Shipped This  🔗 **Source:** [I Can't Believe Cloudflare Actually Shipped This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8yVdd7lGmw) Cloudflare seemed to have launched a WordPress competitor and they chose April 1st to do it. Is it actually a joke or is it something that we should actually be calling a spiritual successor for WordPress? That is what I'm going to discuss today in this video. Hey, I Ahmed and I'm an open source developer and founder of Command Code, a coding agent with taste. So, I have deep interest in discussing this topic because I spent more than a decade building the core software of WordPress. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions and we are going to unpack all of what is written in the introduction to M dash uh you know CMS post from cloudfare in full disclosure I'm founder of command code and if you go to our about page you will actually see that we have great investors but one of those great investors is actually Dane so we love what Cloudflare is doing you know this goes to say that Cloudflare also supports you know what we are building it on a face cloudflare has this history of launching projects instead of April fool jokes on 1st of April every year. I would know because I was one of the earliest users of Cloudflare. So when I built Langbase in command code, we chose Cloudflare as a host to bunch of infrastructure. So when Dean went ahead and announced this announcing mdash, the WordPress virtual successor built for modern web with TypeScript which is serverless MIT license uh and built for the agent era. I had a lot of thoughts, right? I feel like you cannot just say these things so lightly nowadays, right? And this is coming right off the bat after Cloudflare actually vibe coded a Nex.js in a competitor called Vinex within a week and was kind of called out for it. This one however is a little bit different. So this is a tweet from Dean and I instantly replied like I don't know if this comes close to being a WordPress successor. I mean the idea is no, don't get me wrong, but there are many things that are wrong about this. I feel like the WordPress like look of their dashboard is throwing me off and the entire uh you know stab at WordPress for security and plugins. I don't know about that. So let's dive a little bit deeper into this and discuss WordPress versus mdash. One of the first things I'm going to start with is if you take a look at this WordPress is a tool the open-source content management system content has this innate ability. It requires to be managed. The moment you start working with a bunch of team members and you are writing a lot of content, you would come to this realization as well. I started very early on WordPress. I started uh writing blogs maybe as early as 2001 and most of my blogs are actually built with WordPress. When I was in my early 20s, WordPress was the cool kid in town, right? There was Jumla, there was Drupal and there was a bunch of other mess like the blogger platform from Google, but WordPress was it at that moment. Like you know how typescript and react are so cool nowadays or agentic engineering is so cool nowadays that is what we felt like working on WordPress. So now a lot has changed. WordPress is 24 years old. WordPress is right now still 40% of the internet. If you go to this W3 text website you will see that 60% of all the CMS uh in probably top 10 million websites is still WordPress. And that is almost 42% like almost half of the web is WordPress. I think WordPress is successful because one of the biggest reasons was easy to install. WordPress had this famous 5minut install and this was one of the earliest wins. And then the second thing that kind of jumped on me was plug-in ecosystem. It was open source or GPL friendly. It was super easy to install. So when I started working with WordPress, I found it very easy that I can easily test a bunch of different plugins and I don't have to go through the entire FTP route or whatnot. And then came the entire extensible infrastructure around this like the first thing was custom post types, CPTs, right? Where you know by default WordPress was actually just built for writing blog posts or you know creating pages. But now with custom post types you could create different things. You could sell things. You could create a books custom post type. You could create you know a software custom post type whatnot. And WordPress adoption actually completely uh you know spread like a fire because of that thing. And then the rest of it was maybe around 2011 or 10 when we got the rest API in WordPress and we started using it as a headless CMS of sorts. And then around the time when Gutenberg happened I was very deeply involved in the Gutenberg project. uh WordPress actually started adopting earlier version of faxjs which became reactjs. So and then WordPress actually uh got Facebook to open source react. I remember creating the issue on GitHub GitHub going down because of this discussion around that issue and how WordPress kind of influence uh a huge community and a huge uh tech form like Facebook at the time to open source both GraphQL and React, right? So WordPress has this amazing ecosystem of developers uh plug-in and you can also say themes that made it really really fun to use. But around five or six years ago something started to break. You know the ecosystem started to go in a different direction and developers started to lose interest in WordPress. Developers started to build with React and TypeScript. I feel like developers kind of left the WordPress ecosystem when they found it to be very very sticky. um and the backward compatibility was a big issue or whatnot. And since then while WordPress has continued to grow in the nontechnical community, the super admins, the people who are not actually uh ready to pay for custom software, who depend on a lot of themes and uh you know uh custom plugins all day long, but the modern cutting stack has kind of moved away from the CMS, right? I think that is sort of what uh Cloudflare is trying to do. So Cloudflare has introduced MDS. Cloudflare just recently acquired Astro. Astro is a framework that is built around content-driven websites, basically blogs, right? If you're writing a lot of blogs or building a lot of fast marketing websites, Fred and team did an amazing job in building Astro and Astro can work with anything. It can work with Vue, uh, ReactJS, I think Swelt as well, and can even work without JavaScript, right? So, it's a static site generation framework of sorts. So right after acquiring Astro I think Cloudware is actually trying to capture the CMS space of sorts. And if you read through this uh you know blog post they talk about WordPress being uh an old dog here like 24 years old started when there was no EC2 and created a huge ecosystem of service. That is actually true. For example building with WordPress and I was a JavaScript developer of sorts or a web developer of sorts and I I was building with a bunch of different things right. I remember studying like 26 different programming languages and wasn't able to decide which one to you know build my expertise in but because of WordPress I ended up becoming a PHP and a JS developer of sorts right so a lot of people actually learned PHP because of WordPress not because PHP was cool but because WordPress was built in PHP so developers started learning it right similarly u when WordPress started I think git was not even built at that time so it started on SVN so a bunch of us started learning SVN trunk and whatnot based on WordPress. All of this goes to say that WordPress inspired a lot of developers to adopt a bunch of technologies that we only adopted because uh you know WordPress was built on top of it, right? Similar thing happened when WordPress created this ecosystem of servers, right? And that server always had this one thing. It would have like a C panel. It would be cheap. I remember seeing you know anywhere from $1, dollar 100 per month servers, right? It would be shared. it would always have PHP and MySQL support in it. So this was the thing that WordPress did. WordPress inspired a lot of hosting companies to create a pack repeatable pack that is easily shared that is cheap and it which is built on top of this following tech. Make sure it is secure make sure it is cheap and a huge industry came out of this right even now if you try to host MySQL or Postgress or whatnot you have to pay a bunch of uh amount of uh money to make sure that it can do a bunch of things. WordPress was was this like a monolithic software where you can get everything. Installing WordPress would mean something like this. The WordPress tack would give you o it would give you uh content so your you know blog post and pages and it would give you uh media hosting right there. Then it was extensible with plugins and themes and then you could hire uh cheap labor developers everywhere on fiber or whatnot to build anything you want and customize uh you know however you want. This was the WordPress stack. Nowadays if you want to do all of this you have to go after a bunch of different O services you have to buy uh a bunch of different CDNs to host media. And this is uh you know this is where the developers actually have ended up a lot like theming space is mostly chat scen and tailwind and plug-in space is mostly you know typescript npm packages or whatnot and developers are able to infinitely customize but nontechnical people it becomes very very hard for them to use whatever developers can customize and that's where WordPress actually won that's why WordPress was successful to put it simply WordPress built out a CMS stack for everyone one both non and technical people. So devs WordPress inspired hosting business both shared and managed and it was extremely easy to scale you know you you could easily hit a million visitors a day on a shared instance by the way right and not a bad an eye on it or you could completely customize it scale and customization right so this is why I think WordPress became successful a seamless tack which is mostly always backward compatible it is built for both non nontechnical and developers even though in recent years it is more so built for the non-technical people and developers are just uh supporting that because of the supply and demand like you know uh a lot of people hire developers who want to to customize WordPress and it was able to inspire a typical lampstack or lampstack hosting business which this entire industry kind of depends on the go kinstar WP engines of this space and it was very easy to scale and customize this is why WordPress became super successful. Obviously, there was no EC2 or S3 and other, you know, compute primitives that now developers have come to love and appreciate when the CMS was being built. Again, this is uh 24 25 years old CMS, right? So, uh Craft is saying that we are rebuilding the CMS. They've been building it for 2 months and this is built from grounds up. This is not uh built from uh you know the WordPress core. Uh this is a bold claim. I I will tell you why just in a minute. And they're saying that uh MD is TypeScript and it is serverless and their plug-in uh architecture is extremely secure built on top of their isolate based worker dynamic worker thing. Let's let's actually jump and see you know check out what the playground is like. Right. So they have a fancy little playground here. Still waiting. Okay, it's ready. Oh my god, this is so bad. This looks like a poorly vibe coded WordPress dashboard. This does not look good. So when you when you say things like you know this is built from the ground up and then you build a dashboard like this somebody like me would wonder like what what is going on here? I remember having a discussion with the spacing of these widgets for weeks when we were redesigning the WordPress dashboard from I think maybe WordPress 3.1 to 3.4. I could be wrong, right? But oh my god, so much is wrong here. As a WordPress developer uh who spent a good amount of time in WordPress core, this looks bad. It would have been much better if they created a new dashboard for MD dash. You know, first of all, we would not be able to judge it on every little thing like this. I I hardly can read this. There's an accessibility issue here. Uh you know, uh the color should be much more darker to u do the WCAG uh I think 2.0 u on this color. It's like MD is trying too hard to be like, hey, I am the new WordPress migrate to me vibe, right? And I don't like it, right? But yeah, I'll give it uh give it a a go. So there are pages, posts, media. This is very familiar. If you're coming from WordPress, this almost feels like VIP coded. Um, I'm going to go ahead to this page about Oh my god, this is so bad. I was just uh on this live stream. I was actually reading u Matt Mullenberg's blog post on this particular MDF feedback. There you go. And it's not tiny MC. I think it's something called portable text, which is the same thing. And this is what Matt is saying. This is this is regression. This this does not look good. This this feels very bad. Anybody who is using WordPress would have a lot to say about this. A lot of people who are not deep into the CMS space, they think that just by slapping a visive, what you see is what you get u plugin on a content uh page like this would make it would give this a CMS vibe. That is not it. This is actually really bad. Why? Because like for example, I cannot write markdown here. Let's say I'm going to do this. I I don't want to do a vywig here. I want to see what I'm writing. Where's the texton mode here? I don't know where that is. So this feels like a regression. This feels like what WordPress used to look like back in like 2007 2008, right? And we have gone so much ahead. We have built a reactbased Gutenberg stack built with blocks which is so much more modern than this and something is continuously failing. So this is their cloudflare's playground. I expect it to work. I'm a you know ex WordPress developer. you want to convince me that uh you know I should be using this from the perspective of somebody uh coming from WordPress. They're going to look at this. The first thing they're going to do is they're going to try and change the title. Save it. They will see it fail. Publish it. Okay, it is published. Live view. No, nothing was changed. What? You know WordPress can uh show you the live preview even without publishing anything. And what is going on here? This is so bad. The design is so bad. The experience is let me change this to M dash. M dash and let's put it m dash here. I'm going to save. Apparently it got saved live view. Now it I can probably change it. I have a feeling that if I were to do this, it will still fail. And how do I update this? I can't update this. I have to save it. I have to unpublish it then. Oh, what happened to my content here? My content just got lost. What? So, let's say this is my old content. I'm going to save it. I'm going to publish it. I'm going to live view it. What? Why is it still saying about when it What happened to old that I wrote here? What is going on? You're building a content management system, CMS. You cannot lose my content. What is happening to my content? This is This is really bad. I can say no nice words about this. Moving on because this is a white-coded mess of sorts. I think uh this gives me a really really bad view. If I cannot trust my CMS to keep to store my content, uh how can I move forward? Like even in WordPress, I remember working on that thing where you know if you have uh edited something and you accidentally close that tab even that something would be stored and WordPress would give you uh you know that you know you left this copy you didn't save you didn't publish it's still in your browser you want us to save it that thing uh I don't know if you are saying that this is a content management system the first thing I'm going to judge you on is if it can manage my content. Moving on to blog posts. I can see a bunch. I'm going to delete one to see if that works. This UI is oddly familiar. It feels like they're absolutely copying WordPress. I'm going to create a new blog post. I'm going to call it old. I'm going to put some image here. What happened to the image that I had uploaded? Okay, I'll let that slide. There's old content here. I'm going to call it old. I'm going to publish it. Didn't I just publish it? Why is it asking me to publish again? Add new one. Two. No, I think I saved it. The button just jumped on me. So, I don't know where this new button came from. And it says old old. And here's uh first comment. There's a reason why when you install WordPress, it comes with a bunch of placeholder. So, you can see things like this. Okay. If I change it to new, save it. It is changing. So, that is probably good. But it was not changing on pages. So something is wrong with pages comments pending approved. Yeah, maybe we should have the all comments thing at the first like WordPress. If you're copying WordPress, take the good bits of WordPress. Don't add a weird new user experience that I'm not used to as a WordPress developer. Uh this feels very much like they gave a couple of screenshots of WordPress admin dashboard and a coding agent wipe quoted this or or something like that, right? Like I don't mind this. But does it actually work? Uh, doesn't seem to work. I'm trying to bring this down here. I can't. Okay. Weird. Uh, what is this? Content block menu. Blah blah blah blah blah. Let's make it menu. And here I can call it link. Uh, how do I link primary navigation? What is menu? I have no idea what display a navigation menu. Okay. How do I add a link? Am I supposed to add a link here? Let's try command code. Save. Uh, view the site. Okay, this is the sidebar. So, it should be somewhere in the sidebar. Okay, so yeah, uh, the content block actually does not render content probably. Yeah, I have a lot of feelings here. Moving on. Uh, they they have some reusable content blocks. They're calling sections. If I add a new section, maybe it will get stored. They already have a newsletter signup section that you can probably edit. I have rather no idea how to use this. If I copy this, it is copying this. Is this a short code like WordPress? If I go here and put this here as this, will it work? Saved uh unpublished live view. No, I don't know how that works. And that is not quite apparent. So, I'm going to move forward. Categories tags looks very familiar. Why? What is by line? This these colors are giving me strong bootstrap vibe. So, uh which is not good if it is not apparent by the way. Shouldn't this be in a word, you know, users profile page, which is where you should have all of the bio or whatnot. I don't know why what the by lines thing is. Maybe because they're called mdash, they're leaning heavily into this editorial or journalistic vibe or whatnot. We can create content and custom uh post types. Oh, this this is good. If I created books or book actually, where's the button? Is this the button? Yes, I can add more. Can I add like a multis select? Uh, one, two, three, one. Add field. What happened to the multis select? I just added just disappeared. Text. Okay, this got added, but the multis select one did not. Select multi 1 2 3 is getting added. But when I was adding one 1 2 3 it just dies without any errors. So like it has a strong wipe coded thing going on here. A bunch of errors that should not exist. Um I don't know. And now if I go to books cpt uh I can see one of them here. This is good. This is how WordPress works. Uh so yeah this is pretty good in plugins. This is the part one which I'm most excited about. So, it's a little bit sad that there are no default plugins here for me to play around with. And I think they build a really nice import your website from WordPress thing which I've been looking at um you know on different tweets or whatnot. This entire thing feels like a silly UI copy of WordPress though. Uh major thumbs down for that. Okay, going back into the blog post. They're saying this is a modern TypeScript variant. By the way, I have not shared this publicly, but I have been building on something like this as well just for my own uh you know projects. I have been calling it typress. Uh I started it like two months ago and it's SQLite based, it's file based, MDX based and it has a WordPress compatible API, WordPress compatible TypeScript interface like you can literally uh uh feel that in our API or in in you know like in things like hooks or whatnot. It's the same paradigm like for example this is how you would register a short code. You can see the almost you can get this idea of like oh am I in PHP world or is this TypeScript right that is how close the entire uh you know syntax is. In fact 3 years ago I was actually planning to launch a startup called worldless. I still have the domain for it. It had a CLI. It was using WordPress but you could use anything for the front end and it was TypeScript and a lot of fun with a sandbox environment super secure for your WordPress. So you could run actual WordPress but take out what you need from it. This is sort of what I think uh Cloudflare is trying to do here. Moving forward, uh it is MI MIT license. So this is good. WordPress has uh been a GPL license thing where if you create something with WordPress, it has to be GPL otherwise uh you know, I think you're breaking the terms of the license. Also, Mac Mill, one of the co-founders of WordPress is not going to be happy if you're not doing GPL, right? So that that is one thing that is going for it. WordPress has accomplished a lot. It has practically helped build a generation of developers who understand how to extend a software. But Typescript has started winning. Astro is a phenomenal web framework nowadays. And MDH is committing to build something like that which is open source cost a little because Cloudflare cost a little in the beginning at least while fixing the core problems of WordPress. And the core problem is uh WordPress plug-in security crisis. Uh 96% of WordPress issues are happening due to plugins. I don't like this one bit. It's like saying 96% of accidents happen on the you know cross-sections, right? Or you know where there are no traffic lights or what not, right? This will always be true. Remember how big the Exio hack was just like a couple weeks ago. Nothing is secure. Your Python packages are not score secure. Your JavaScript npm packages are not secure. So WordPress plugins are not secure. This is the basis of any software. So calling a WordPress not secure or WordPress plug-in security crisis because of that I think is a it's not good. It's a stab at the WordPress ecosystem that anybody coming from the WordPress ecosystem would not like. You want to win us over. you want to win people who've been building with WordPress for 15 or 20 years. This is not how you do it. I have a dislike uh of this entire thing. I think this is very distasteful. Instead, it would have been much better to share the new way of building plug-in that Mdash is kind of coining here. They have this dynamic worker thing where you can run your uh you know generated code or untrusted code and nm dash plugin has to explicitly declare in its manifest what it needs and it runs in a separate isolate which probably looks like this. So, a malicious plug-in in WordPress can do anything with the WordPress um stack you have. But the M dash uh way of doing this is rather complicated, but what they're trying to probably show is you can run untrusted code in dynamic worker and if something goes wrong, it just says wrong here, but all of your other things will be secure. I don't think that will be true though. Uh because if if you look at this code, by the way, this is the only plug-in code I could find. I literally Googled Mdash plugins. Um um you know, there was really nothing I could find here. I actually tried to go and check in this if I could install a plugin because there's a huge piece of uh pitch you know that art plugins are much better than WordPress but where are those plugins this does not tell me much by the way right this tells me that you know these are the capabilities you're signing up for and this is when it will run is this for developers if this is for developers maybe they will understand it but developers would not have security issues with WordPress either uh maybe I could probably see both sides of the things what Cloudflare is trying to get at is something like this so you install WordPress it's a monolithic so you get your O, you get your content and you get your plugins and you have your DB database. But plugins can do anything to your content, anything to your O, anything to your database and they can also contact external services without you having any say. So this is how WordPress is at the moment. What end is saying is we are built different. You will be building on top of primitives. One primitive will be worker and the other primitive will be a dynamic worker and each plug-in will be run in a separate dynamic worker. So MD is saying that all of your MD CMS will be in a worker and in primitives like R2 which is their storage and D1 which is the database. This worker will talk to this particular database and each plug-in will actually have their isolated dynamic worker. And at this point it is worth discussing what is actually a worker. So if you scroll down here in their blog post they actually talk about this that uh the scale to zero problem of WordPress or whatn not because WordPress is a monolithic and it has to be always on. Mdash is solving that problem but because it is being built on top of Cloudflare primitives uh and Cloudflare workers are actually isolates. They are workers are actually built on top of Viet engine the same engine that powers Chrome and every worker is like a chrome a new chrome tab. So similar to how this tab cannot see what is in this tab that is the isolation layer they depend on and they are very very cheap compared to a traditional container architecture you can have a bajillion workers in the same machine and they have very real limits by the way like if you go to cloudflare worker docs um and look at their platform limits you will see that um on for free you can only do 100,000 requests a day u and then the max amount of memory each worker can have is 128 MB this is a hard limit if you're trying to do something more like you are trying to process a huge PDF that has like a thousand pages, which is the problem we actually ran into when building language memory on top of workers. You can't do that with workers at all. You have to have like a full container where you have like 4 GB of RAM, so you can load the entire, you know, uh PDF and a memory uh first to be able to split it, right? Things like that and a bunch of other things like, you know, you can only have uh 500 workers in your Cloudflare account. You can use Cloudflare uh Cloudflare for platforms which is pretty good but it comes with its own uh set of limits. So everything serverless has weird limits to it. Like for example, if you're building a million websites on top of Cloudflare uh platform, you will run into this weird limit that we actually ran into when building chai. Which was an agent of agents that could build any agents and sites and deploy to Cloudflare for platforms. And this is if you have more than 1,200 people doing something within 5 minutes, you will just hit that limit. This limit is very scary and there's no easy way to figure out how do we get over this limit or how do we fix that limit or whatn not. Again, this this just goes to say that while there are huge positives and pros that comes with this type of compute platform and it is serverless, it can scale to zero, but it is also a vendor lockin for Cloudflare. even though their uh Cloudflare's runtime worker is open source. I have yet to see anybody deploy a worker on their own. Just like Matt actually said something like this in his blog post. Yeah, a random web host in Indonesia charging 9 cents a month can host WordPress. Your Raspberry Pi can host WordPress, right? But uh this uh I don't know how many are doing this. So this is like you know a Cloudflare um vendor login. So while the motivation to build mdash is good, it's not the same motivation that WordPress has. WordPress wants to be the most and always has wanted to be the most open, you know, content management system that you can do and take anywhere. I think Matt actually said something like this. The spirit of WordPress. Yeah, WordPress exists to democratize publishing, right? Anybody should be able to do it. We want to put it everywhere. WordPress on a Raspberry Pi on your phone desktop and the WordPress playground which actually just now runs in your browser using web assembly. Right? This is a WordPress website which is running in the browser right now. So if I were to go and edit this site, uh this is a really nice Gutenberg blocks based framework that you can use to edit the site or whatnot. Right? So WordPress has this nice ecosystem around it that you just don't see in mdash and mdash feels a lot like a regression uh of sorts and when you call it like a spiritual successor of WordPress like what is that spirit that you're trying to build on top of the spirit of calling WordPress out for random plug-in security code I don't think that is it the spirit of saying that the marketplace of WordPress is a lock in I have never once felt that way the WordPress marketplace is an awesome place to put your plugins and themes at. It is reviewed. Nowadays in the time of agentic engineering, we know how long those and how uh uh useful those human reviews are. WordPress has always been that way. And you only go to that WordPress marketplace if you want the benefits of a marketplace because there are millions of people looking for themes and plugins in a marketplace. You actually by publishing to that marketplace, you can get a lot of eyes on your whatever you're building, right? you you're you're more than welcome to publish a WordPress plug-in on your own on GitHub, you know, put it on npm for all it takes and anybody can use it, right? So that is not a problem uh uh and that is not the spirit of WordPress. WordPress actually wants to be very very open, right? GP license is a lock in. If you build something with WordPress, it has to be GP license. This is the thing that MD says that they are trying to avoid with MIT license. I kind of welcome this. MIT license is great. You can do whatever the you want with MIT license. So the plugins and themes you build can have any license uh you want but plugins can run independently in a secure sandbox. A plug-in can be provided to your site and can be trusted without you ever having to see the code. I don't know about that, right? Uh I will never trust uh close source software. Um it could be true to say that you know this malicious plugin or malicious mdash dynamic worker would not cause harm to my site. But both as a developer and as you as a user I know I will give a plug-in access to a bunch of things. Right? Now by looking at just this code it is already asking for two capabilities and uh a hook right if a plug-in is serious enough. Imagine something like an e-commerce plug-in of WooCommerce. It will ask for so many things that every user would treat it like a you know a ooth page or a terms page. Yeah. Yeah. Accept everything. Get me this plug-in. Let me use that. And again the problem would not be solved. This is this is by nature a problem I think you cannot solve. So calling it as a good thing for mdash uh in putting it in spirit of WordPress this is distasteful. I don't like this. I think it could have been shown in a much better way where cloudflare could have shown that this is how we are solving the problem and this is how what we think the future is. WordPress tried to do their own thing and we think that is respectable. we are trying to do our own thing because our worker platforms is pretty good and on our worker platforms we can run untrusted code right but comparing it to WordPress I think is distasteful later on they also tell that they have x42 support which I think WordPress has as well like a bunch of plugins I've seen in the market uh building on top of it so that's not something new scale to zero uh you can find very very cheap WordPress hosting companies so I don't know who we are talking to here but I see that cloudflare uh is doing something really fun like I have always loved building on top of workers platform. So from that point of view it does feel like if you are building on your own a small marketing site when I say small as in like you won't build a multiwordpress like thing with it a serverless platform would actually outsmart WordPress hosting by a lot but WordPress is not just about it hosting. People are not trying to use WordPress to save money. WordPress has so many more customization in options, availability, resources, developers who can customize it compared to a new CMS which has always been an issue. If you build a new CMS, you have to build a community around it. You have to get developers to care about it. You have to get several different u you know players in the market to be able to easily deploy it and then hope that you end up building a marketplace that will eventually work. All of which has and is missing from Mdash because it is new. And things to like about uh MD-R are definitely that it is built on top of Estro in my test. As you saw here, a bunch of things broke. I don't like this. I could easily use a coding agent to build a CMS to justify my needs on top of Estro or whatever I want and I can test it. If you are going to provide me with a CMS, the least I expect is that it should be working in every which way. We all saw how I was not able to edit this page and how this page continuously loses the content that I have put in. I love the fact that I can use Tailwind for styling and it's just a JSON file that could be a seed for it. Astro is pretty good. So I think all the benefits of Astro being fast or whatnot would just automatically transfer to this. And one of the most uh uh common things uh I think there are a bunch of comments on how functions.php is its execution engine or whatnot. We all know what press is a monolithic. Comparing a monolithic software with serless is the oldest debate there is. Serless has pros and cons. Monolith uh has pros and cons, right? So let's just settle the debate there. What I really like though is that this is maybe probably the first AI native CMS. I really enjoy this. It has a CLI and skills. Uh they've built a bunch of skills. I was just looking at those skills somewhere here. Let me actually uh grab the GitHub link. And you should, by the way, go ahead and start this. They have a bunch of skills here that they built. Like if you're trying to build a WordPress uh if you know how to build a WordPress plugin, if you use command code or plot code or any coding agent, you can just use this skill and tell it that this is the type of WordPress plugin I have and can you please convert it to mdash. This skill will do wonders. I think it will be able to very easily understand what to translate from WordPress to mdash. So that is a lot of fun but I have yet to do a test. So we will see right and there's also a WordPress theme to mdash uh thing here which has a bunch of content in it. So there's this template, there's some references and a bunch of different things, right? I can't shake this feeling that uh a new developer to the CloudFare ecosystem will get confused by this and would feel like you know what did I just do, right? Because it will feel a lot like AWS when you deploy a Terraform template to AWS. It ends up provisioning a lot of services on AWS. I feel like that is what a developer might feel coming from a WordPress monolithic. I buy um um a specific piece of uh you know stack $100 a month or $20 a month and I just pay for that versus I'm buying into a serverless world where I could be charged a lot more uh for who knows what because I don't understand a bunch of these things problem right this is again a problem that not a developer would probably face a lot but uh users of WordPress would and since this is trying to get developers excited I would hope yeah so any moving on I really like that they have a CLI they skills and this is this might be a very early view of what an agentic CMS might look like but uh it might not be actually true right uh I think the future of Agentic CMS is just a website that can code itself right uh not a pre-built CMS that has preddecided API that is trying to do a lot of things that may or may not be needed by anyone I think writing code is absolutely cheap now so we should only be writing code that is necessary instead of here's my boiler plate. Uh the the time where your boiler plate worked for me was the time when I didn't want to write all of that code. I neither had the time and the investment or the ability to bear the cost of that particular uh you know boiler plate. But now I can just talk to any coding agent and I can say build me this this and that and it will build things the way I want and only what I want. Right? So I feel like in 2026 launching a new CMS is a big bet. I like the fact that they are using pass keys for O and O is cooked in. I have to again check how good this is um platform limits and there you go. So your database cannot be more than 500 MB for free and 10GB on worker paid. I think I have a bunch of WordPress websites that have a lot more in you know their database than 10GB. So that will be the first thing someone like me would worry about. And then there are all sorts of other problems as well like D1 like if you look at the pricing of D1 it is based on the number of requests you are sending and not based on the type of compute you have. So on a 20 bucks server from say Kinsta or something like this we know we are only paying 20 bucks and if we get more load we will not be able to serve those limits. But on something like D1 because it is serless if something goes wrong you will end up with a huge bill. You will have to pay a lot more. And I'm willing to bet that even with my current website on MySQL, which is currently hosted on Kinsta with WordPress by the way, um the amount of automations that I run would render more than $25 bill on D1 alone, right? So yeah, there's something to be said about serless. While it is like a huge unlock, it comes with its own limits and expenses and distributed u you know compute problem and that is pretty much about it. So in the closing, I would probably say this, it is not easy to compete with WordPress. We saw the playground. Uh I still couldn't find a single mdash plugin. Maybe that is on me. But if you are talking if half of your content on the introduction is about how WordPress plugins are so bad and a security nightmare, even though I understand the Cloudflare stack so well, I want to see more demos. I want to see more plugins. I want to see and play around with how that experience would look like, right? That is not there. I definitely feel like the vendor lockin is going to be a huge deal for a lot of people. For me personally, I don't mind the vendor lockin of Cloudflare. I think Cloudflare is pretty amazing. I would not bat an eye but built on top of Cloudflare. I just find that uh Mdash in its current state and it's a new early version. I I get that. I don't feel like it is a true spiritual successor to WordPress. We already discussed why WordPress is successful and the only thing that's left is what is the future of WordPress. I think WordPress is here to stay. I think developers are leaving WordPress. This is happening because you can build anything with AI and this is a little bit self- serving as well. I will be the first one to acknowledge that. I'm founder of command code which is a coding agent but I'm building this coding agent because I think that is the eventual dev tool right that is all you really need if I want to use a CMS one year 6 months down the road and I have enough time let's say a week or so I will build my own CMS and I have done just that I've built typress two months ago for a use case and it does all the things in the WordPress way uh that I am used to as you can see with the API here uh just for me I didn't make it public because you know I don't know if the API is that good um it's still private but just for me for my use case I was able to build this within two days right uh and this mimics the entire WordPress API by the way it has the same uh ecosystem you can build you know a very simple blog looks very similar to what I think mdash is this these are what pages uh look like or what not this is what your HTML looks like or what not it has a complete plug-in ecosystem here's analytics plug-in plugin that has very similar API to WordPress. If you're coming from the WordPress world, you know, you have your hooks and whatnot or whatnot. Uh, and it works in the very similar fashion as well. So, I think developers are actively leaving pre-built boilerplate software. What about users? I think users are now builders, right? And to some extent, they are able to vibe code anything, anything they want. Instead of going to hire a developer, they are able to build a basic version of it through different by coding websites like Repliable and and the likes, right? So what is the feature of WordPress? When users can build basic software and developers can build whatever they want. I feel like the WordPress usage might go down and down and down. It's not going to go up. That is what I'm predicting. And I think the only thing we will end up relying on will be APIs and CLIs. So if I am building something that requires storage, I want a really good reliable API for that storage blob storage. So I will go to S3 or R2 or I don't know tress data if I want super super speed or whatnot. And then the thing that I'm building on top of that, I will not use a pre-built CMS, a pre-built API, a pre-built package for it. I have this mandate that I don't want dependencies in my software anymore. So anything new that I'm building now, I end up building the dependencies first because AI has made it super easy for me to do that. This is why I've taken a huge bet on taste that if I build enough software, command code would build a scale of how I write code. So I can build a lot more of it whenever I want. And that is I feel where the world is going. And to APIs are generally quite verbose by the way, right? uh CLIs are easiest possible interfaces of those APIs. If there's a CLI for whatever you are doing, whatever package you have built, a CMS or whatnot, I can use my agent with your CMS or whatever that I see already happening with Mdash, right? So that part is good. One more thing that I can kind of think of less touch points. If whatever you are building has less touch points on different pieces of infrastructure like if you're building something that requires a database and then it requires a vector database and then it requires storage and a bunch of other things. Um maybe software like WordPress will continue to win in that space for a while. But what I'm seeing developers do a lot is they are building things with less touch points where here's a file system and I'm going to just throw all of my data in those files. file systems have worked for 60 years now and I think they are only going to grow a lot more where we will just dump a lot of information in the CMS. I think the management of your content will be done by an AI agent and I think the content will just become files. This is what I think the future of CMS is. You throw a bunch of files in folders in a blob storage and then you know run your coding agent on top of it. This is what I do all the day long nowadays as well. Right now everything that is happening I have a bunch of things that are recording me no matter what type of uh conversation I'm having throughout the day. I have a local AI model running that dumps a bunch of content files transcripts of whatever I'm doing. And then at the end of the day my coding agent command code runs on those files and it does fun things. It builds software. It builds content from it in the system system part I'm not so sure about. I think this is what is changing almost every other week with uh you know every AI model becoming more and more intelligent. It's hard to imagine what the future would look like, right? But this, I feel like, is the future of WordPress. It will still be here for people who are using it for reasons that developers probably do not agree with. And I think eventually a lot of developers will leave WordPress because of the backward compatibility, because of the lot of touch points it has, and because it is, sad to say, because it is PHP, right? A lot of developers nowadays don't care about PHP, right? And that's pretty much it. Um let me know in your comments uh what you think is the future of WordPress, what you think are the good things from the Mdash uh CMS from Cloudare and if you have built a couple of plugins or if you have seen a couple of plugins from MD dash in the wild, I would love to see uh I would love to you know try them out. All in all, I really like that Cloudfare is building a CMS. I really like that they are exploring what content would look like managed on their primitives. What I don't like is I don't think it's a spiritual uh you know successor of WordPress and I don't think uh you know calling like WordPress has so many security issues is the right or tasteful way to go about it. With that uh this is pretty much it. Peace., I Can't Believe Cloudflare Actually Shipped This, YouTube, 01kp62naa0vf11bptjdmc4nhvp.