One changed word, and the whole site was slow for two hours. It isn't the cold start that slows EmDash down on Cloudflare, it's an empty cache. What empties it, how long it lasts and what helps, measured over ten days.
Three days after 1.3.0, EmDash 1.3.1 brings 41 changes, almost all of them fixes. Your edits no longer vanish after unpublishing, subscribers can't peek at drafts through the API, and category pages on Cloudflare no longer get stuck. Who should update now, and what to check first.
Since 9 October 2026, the repository spells out who decides what in EmDash and which path a change takes. A bot reviews pull requests, but only a human can approve one, and a sweep closes PRs left waiting on their author. You can contribute without touching core code, too, for example with a translation or a docs fix.
For scripts, bulk edits and AI agents, EmDash ships three ways in: the REST API, the CLI and a built-in MCP server. All three run on the same tokens and permissions, but they don't behave the same. The CLI, for one, publishes straight away unless you tell it not to. Plus the traps we walked into running The Weekly Dash.
If several people work on your EmDash site or you're moving from WordPress, 1.3 is the bigger update. We show what changes for teams, people switching from WordPress and sites on Cloudflare, and we tested the update ourselves.
On 1 April, some people thought EmDash was an April Fools' joke. Five months later came 1.0, and people from the WordPress world took a close look. Paul from WPTuts tripped over the installation and said so on X. What happened next shows why honest criticism is the most valuable thing you can give an open source project.
Search Engine Journal accuses EmDash 1.0 of Cloudflare lock-in. I checked every claim against the code and the docs and ran EmDash with plugins on Node.js. Some of the criticism lands, some doesn't.
Less than a week after 1.1.0, EmDash 1.2 is here. The editor becomes a writing surface, videos drop straight into the text, and a site moves to a new domain without passkey chaos. What the update brings and what to check first.
One paragraph of brief, nine minutes, a joinery website with its own content model. Two test runs show what EmDash Build already does, where the build stumbles and why it isn't a client site yet.
Before your EmDash site goes live in Germany or Switzerland, it usually needs a legal notice (Impressum) and almost always a privacy policy. I'll show you when each duty applies, how to create and link both pages without code, and which data an EmDash site on Cloudflare actually processes.
Two rules taken from the name carry the whole design: weekly issues and the dash as the only motif. Posts get data sheets as covers instead of stock photos, and EmDash on Cloudflare does the rest.
Creating a content type in the admin takes a few minutes. Getting it onto your site takes two small Astro pages. I build both for an events listing and show you the order to ship them in on a live site.
Our public pages sit in Cloudflare's edge cache for five minutes, yet a published fix shows up right away, because EmDash purges by cache tag when you publish, and editors keep their Edit button. The five minutes are just the safety net for a purge that doesn't happen. How much faster the pages get, I'll measure after launch.
EmDash promises safe plugins thanks to its sandbox. I ran a probe plugin locally and on Cloudflare: what the sandbox really blocks, where its limits kick in and why the plugins agencies build most often run outside it.
The WordPress import brings every ACF value along, but repeaters arrive split up and images and relationships point to old WordPress IDs. I show how a small script turns them into real EmDash fields, and what's still manual work.
Almost everything in the EmDash admin takes a minute. What costs you is what you can't change later: field slugs, field types and category slugs. With two languages, add a byline per language. Sort those out before your first post.
Is EmDash worth it for agencies that look after lots of WordPress sites? An honest comparison: where EmDash shines, where WordPress is still ahead and how to run a pilot without risk.
Let Wrangler create D1 and R2 on your first deploy and Cloudflare picks where they live, for good. If the database ends up in North America, every uncached page pays about 140 ms per query from Europe. Create both yourself first, with --location weur. If you're past that point, read replication helps with reads, but only a move fixes it.
Title, tagline, logo and favicon are set in the admin; colours and fonts live in code. Here are the three files you touch, and why your fonts come from your own domain even with the Google provider.
EmDash's admin has no update button. An update is a deployment. I updated a site on Cloudflare and rolled it back again, and I walk you through every step, with timings and what happens to your database along the way.