The CMS Question, Again

Joost de Valk wrote about EmDash today. A new CMS built on Astro, deployed on Cloudflare, designed from the ground up for AI agents. Structured content as JSON. An MCP server so Claude can talk to it directly. Sandboxed plugins with permission controls.

It's a thoughtful design. And it matters, because JdV is not some random blogger. He built Yoast SEO, the most installed WordPress plugin on the planet. When the guy who made his career building on WordPress starts building away from it, people notice.

His argument: the CMS should be designed for how we build today. AI agents should be first-class citizens. Structured content should be native, not bolted on. The plugin model should be secure by default. All fair points.

Here's where I disagree: I don't think you need to start from zero to get there.

The ecosystem is the product

EmDash has beautiful architecture and an empty plugin marketplace. WordPress has messy architecture and 60,000 plugins.

Every technically superior CMS in the past decade has faced the same problem. Ghost launched in 2013 with a cleaner editing experience. Craft CMS shipped with a content model WordPress still doesn't have. Statamic runs on flat files and deploys in seconds. All of them are excellent. None of them have the ecosystem.

A CMS without plugins is a framework. A framework without users is a thesis.

JdV acknowledges this. He calls it the "chicken-and-egg dynamic" and then moves on. But that's the whole game. It's not a dynamic to overcome. It's the reason WordPress is WordPress.

The wrong question

"What should a CMS look like when AI agents do the building?"

This is the question EmDash answers. It's a developer question. And the answer is impressive: typed schemas, MCP servers, JSON content, sandboxed plugins.

But I keep coming back to a simpler question: what does the person who wants a website actually need?

They don't care about MCP servers. They don't care about structured JSON vs HTML strings. They don't care about plugin sandboxing architectures. They want to describe their business, get a website, and move on with their lives.

You can do that on WordPress today. I know, because I built it. A single theme that replaces eight plugins, includes an AI page builder, and gets you from install to live site in two minutes. On the same WordPress that powers 40% of the web, with access to thousands of plugins if you ever need them.

Is it architecturally elegant? No. WordPress is a twenty-year-old PHP CMS with a database schema that hasn't changed since the Bush administration. But it works. Millions of people know how to use it. Thousands of hosts support it. When something breaks, you Google it and find an answer from 2019 that still applies.

That's not a weakness. That's a moat.

Two bets

JdV is betting that AI changes the CMS layer itself. That agents need new primitives, and the best way to give them those primitives is to build from scratch.

I'm betting that AI changes the experience layer. That the CMS underneath matters less than what you can do with it. That you can make WordPress feel like magic without replacing WordPress.

We'll see who's right. Maybe both of us, for different audiences. Maybe neither.

But I'll say this: the person who wants a website today doesn't have time to wait for a new CMS to grow an ecosystem. They need something that works right now. And right now, that's still WordPress.

It just needs to be better WordPress.

I'm building SailWP, a free WordPress theme that ships SEO, 2FA, analytics, cookie consent, backups, multilanguage support, and an AI page builder in 94KB. Source on GitHub.