EmDash

Overview

EmDash is an open source, full-stack TypeScript CMS built on Astro, described as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It combines typed content modeling, an admin panel, media and taxonomy management, and agent tooling, while plugins run in isolated sandboxes with declared capabilities.

Key Features

• Astro-native CMS with content types defined in the admin and TypeScript types generated from the schema.
• Drafts, revisions, scheduled publishing, preview links, and full-text search.
• Admin includes a visual schema builder, media library, navigation menus, taxonomies, widgets, and a WordPress import wizard.
• Passkey-first authentication with OAuth and magic link fallbacks, plus role-based access control.
• Built-in MCP server, CLI, and REST API let AI agents and scripts manage content and schema.
• Sandboxed plugin system with declared capabilities, hooks, storage, admin pages, custom blocks, and API routes.

Use Cases

• Build blogs, marketing sites, and portfolios using starter templates.
• Migrate WordPress content, including posts, pages, media, and taxonomies.
• Let AI assistants or coding agents draft, edit, search, and schedule content.
• Extend a site with custom plugins, blocks, admin pages, and API routes.

Getting Started

• Run npm create emdash@latest to scaffold a new project.
• Try the admin in the browser through the EmDash playground.
• Deploy directly to a Cloudflare account using the Deploy to Cloudflare button.

Deployment & Requirements

• Runs on Cloudflare with D1, R2, and Workers, or on any Node.js server with SQLite.
• Database options include SQLite, D1, Turso/libSQL, and PostgreSQL; storage options include R2, AWS S3, S3-compatible services, and local filesystem.
• Plugins execute in sandboxed Cloudflare Worker isolates or in a workerd child process on Node.js.
• Sessions can use KV, Redis, or file-based storage.

Before You Adopt

• License: MIT. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• Core packages follow semantic versioning; breaking changes ship only in major releases and are called out in the changelog.
• First-party plugins and plugin tooling are still on 0.x and may change between minor releases.
• Cloudflare is the best-supported runtime, but EmDash is not locked to it.