EmDash, the so-called successor to WordPress, just released version 1.0. It is a Cloudflare project, the company that runs a big part of the modern internet’s backbone with its massive CDN and server infrastructure.
It looks like Cloudflare is serious about pushing EmDash. They have also released EmDash Build, an open source AI site builder. However, their blog post specifically mentions this target audience:
[…] hosting providers, website builders, and platforms can run themselves and integrate with their own systems […]
However, big companies often miss out (or maybe they just don’t care) on how WordPress became so big.
In 2004, it was not the first or the only open source blogging software. It wasn’t even the best.
The reason people joined WordPress was that it was free, gave a sense of ownership, and made customizations easy. Learning basic PHP, HTML, and CSS was enough to modify templates.
WordPress also built excellent documentation, called the Codex. For a long time, a lot of beginners like me learned which template tag does what from the Codex.
We learned how to write our own plugins, create themes from scratch, and which file does what in WordPress. The forums were amazingly helpful.
There were real people giving the project their time, talent, and passion to help it grow and succeed.
Now a lot of people in the industry think that WordPress may have lost those passionate users. And it may be true, people move on to different things.
The documentation is not as good any more. The forums are not as helpful.
Theme developers now use advanced frameworks and build tools. People are not really studying the code, or hacking it to make cool things.
To be honest, they do not need to. They can ask AI to do all those things in minutes, things that I spent hours to accomplish back in the day.
If EmDash or any other publishing platform wanted similar early adopters, the people who advocated for WordPress with passion, then those people are not at WordPress any more.
They are at Neocities, and in the wider web revival movement.
Businesses of all shapes and sizes now use WordPress. It is not a blogging platform any more, it is a full-fledged website suite.
It has a massive ecosystem of companies, products, agencies, and freelancers spread all over the world. It now helps people make money, and those users are deeply invested in WordPress.
EmDash is currently not as attractive to them. And in this uncertain economy, no one wants to unlearn what little they have left.