Jeff Matson 👾@TheJeffMatson
The WordPress community had has a lot of thoughts about Emdash. Here's mine:
The most important thing to know: it's a CMS layer on top of Astro.
What does that matter? 2 reasons:
1. At it's core, it's not something super new and unstable. Astro is incredibly mature and well maintained.
2. Emdash takes something that was built for modern developers, with a ton of great conveniences, and builds something accessible to WYSIWYG folks on top of it.
I've been using Astro to build sites since the pre-1.0 days. Back then, it was primarily for static content. As it's evolved, it's gone from being a really great SSG to my go-to framework.
IIRC, one of the first ones I put into production was the Pagely Quickstart docs site. Yup, I decided against using WordPress for an enterprise WordPress hosting company's docs site.
Why? Astro was the better tool for the job.
I won't go into all of those details right now, but building and maintaining it in WordPress would have been a PITA. I needed fast, reliable DX with near-zero maintenance.
But here's the problem with Astro: if ya can't write up some code, Astro is gonna be a bad time. It's a framework, not a CMS.
WordPress shines because of the WYSIWYG nature of it. Even your mom can write a blog post in WordPress (she told me in bed last night). If she needs something extra, there's a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes to go wild with. Worst case, she hires a dev to build something custom - WordPress devs far outweigh the demand.
Emdash is to Astro was the WordPress admin dash + post editor is to WordPress core.
But here's the big elephant in the room: is Emdash the "WordPress killer" that it's claimed to be?
Short answer: Ehhhhh... Right now? Not really.
Long answer: Over time, quite possibly. But that's going to depend on a lot of variables.
1. WordPress isn't going anywhere, even if market shifts. We still have demand for COBOL devs, we'll still have demand for WordPress devs for years to come. Companies take an eternity to switch over things that already work fine.
2. The WordPress ecosystem is so huge that it's going to be a while before anyone has 1:1 solutions for all the weird niche stuff. Especially if we're talking about non-devs who need a site builder experience.
3. WordPress could start progressing. If the repo got cleaned up, dev workflows improved, hosting became reliable, and WordPress people stopped being "WordPress people", WordPress could regain the community hype that it used to have.
Anyways, there's my brain dump. If you have thoughts, hit me with 'em.
TLDR: No, Emdash isn't going to murder WordPress. At least not right now. But it has a ton of potential. Only time will tell.
