EmDash: New Plugin Opportunity or Threat?

[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey everybody. Welcome, welcome. This is a special episode of WP Product Talk where, uh, Zack and I are in the same room at the same time, which is weird for us. Um, and we are here at Press Comp, uh, this week in Tempe, Arizona, enjoying the conference here. Uh, and they were kind enough to let us use this room, um, for this special episode where we have.

[00:00:26] Two other Matts as well. We have some rules. We're going to talk about the mat situation here, but last week you might've seen, uh, online an announcement, uh, that ironically happened on April 1st. Uh, but it was true, uh, that Cloudflare has launched a new product called EmDash and um, they launched it saying that they are the spiritual successor of WordPress.

[00:00:48] And so we were like. I wonder if you all would like to talk about that with some WordPress folks. Uh, and they were kind enough to say yes. So Matt TK, Matt Kane, thank you so much for being here. Um, uh, we are privileged to be able to talk with you about it and I'd love if you can introduce yourselves, um, a little bit.

[00:01:08] Um, oh, sorry. The Matt Rules, we talked about this earlier, so everybody can call me Cromwell. People call me Cromwell all the time. We decided Matt Taylor is gonna be TK. Is that right? Um, yes, and then Matt Kane gets the privilege of being called Matt. So, um,

[00:01:24] Matt Kane: I'm honored. I'm honored,

[00:01:28] Matt Cromwell: but, uh, TK, can you introduce yourself?

[00:01:30] Tell us a little bit about what you do, where you're from, um, and, uh, what brings you here today?

[00:01:35] Matt "TK" Taylor: For sure. Um, thanks for inviting on the podcast. Uh, yeah. Hi everyone. I'm TK. I am a senior product manager at Cloudflare. Um, I joined Cloudflare late last year and, uh, worked here in London on the, um, authoring and testing team.

[00:01:50] Probably better known as like the Wrangler team. So, uh, interface for a lot of developers into the Cloudflare developer platform. Um, and EmDash is something that I was kind of thrown into through basically my past experience. So last kind of decade of my life, I have been working in publishing and media.

[00:02:08] Uh, for the last four years I was a product manager at the Financial Times, working on content management systems. Uh, the FT has actually built their own, uh, very bespoke system. Um, and prior to that. I was at, uh, news Corp, who are a large WordPress customer and have been, um, migrating a lot of content to WordPress over many years.

[00:02:25] Um, so yeah. Um, joined Matt on his quest, um, in, uh, kind of February this year and have been enjoying the ride.

[00:02:34] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. And Matt Kane.

[00:02:37] Matt Kane: Hi. Um, yeah, I am. I'm Matt Kane. I'm also in England. Um, I'm a senior principal engineer at Cloudflare. Um, I joined around the same time as, as TK did to the, the, towards the end of last year.

[00:02:50] Um, I am also, I think, more relevantly here. I am one of the core team of the Astro Web framework, so a few of your, some of your listeners and viewers may, may know of, of Astro, but I've been a. Maintainer of Astro for about, about two years now. And I was, before joining Astro, I was the lead on the framework.

[00:03:11] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Cool. Cool. Thanks so much for being here. Um, and we wanted to jump in with some questions. I think, Zack, you got the first question?

[00:03:19] Zack Katz: Yeah. So, uh, can you tell us more about how you ended up building a CMS at Cloudflare? Uh, we'd love to hear the, the story of how that actually, uh, came about.

[00:03:29] Matt Kane: Well, I will, I will take this one because it was, um, it was one of these things that came to me.

[00:03:34] Um, I actually only found out the full details of how this happened, um, uh, only yesterday, in fact. So the previous story that I told was that I was, um, nerd sniped by Dane, RCTO, now, nerd Snipe, as in. Somebody threw me a challenging and very fun problem. Now, what he told me yesterday is that this was actually from math.

[00:03:55] Another Matthew, Matthew Prince, our CEO, that he just passed on to me. Yeah. So he basically said to me, what can we do to, can we build the next WordPress now? This is something that is a, I I mean this is something that particularly astro, um, maintainers have been thinking about a lot, and it's one that I personally have been thinking about quite a lot for a few years.

[00:04:22] And, um, so it was obviously a challenge that I could not. Refuse, I mean, quite apart from the fact that it came from the CEO, um, but it was one that I had also already spent quite a lot of time thinking about. Yeah. So this was the kind of the, the way this came in, and from, as I understand it, this is something that people at Cloudflare had been thinking about for a while, but it, it'd been.

[00:04:45] Too daunting a task, um, until the advent of agents, the AI, that were able to help us on this. So that was effectively, my, my task was that I want, I was going to create what I felt was the, the kind of what WordPress would be if it was created in 2026. Um, and I was gonna do it. With the, you know, the help of an unlimited token budget.

[00:05:14] And this was basically what I was, what I was set out to do, and that's what I've been doing for the past two months.

[00:05:19] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, that's amazing. I, uh, I'll say I tested out and astro quite a bit last year, and I, I immediately was like, how can I tack a CMS onto this? Um, and I, what

[00:05:30] Matt Kane: everyone says is what everyone says.

[00:05:31] Yeah,

[00:05:32] Matt Cromwell: I mean, it works great and it works great with Cursor out of the box and, um, it was really good. But the, I was, I tried out Story Block, um, that seemed to be highly, um, suggested and also tested out, uh, sanity. Um, and they take a very unique and different approach to CMSs. Um, but it seems like EmDash is a lot more.

[00:05:56] WordPress esque. Was that on purpose?

[00:06:00] Matt Kane: 100%. We, we built this very much with the WordPress. WordPress at the front of our mind. You know, we, we weren't. We weren't trying to port WordPress or trying to build, uh, an exact copy of WordPress, but we were wanting to build something that would be familiar to WordPress developers and WordPress users, and we did that by matching as much as we could.

[00:06:29] The concepts from WordPress. So this is why we call it a spiritual successor. This is not designed to be a one for one match, but it is supposed to be. Bringing the parts that you love from WordPress into a, into a modern CMS. And I think that's kind of where we've gone is we've like looked at, at every decision, every stage of every decision we made.

[00:06:51] We've looked at how did WordPress do that? Is this, is this something that people like about how WordPress did it? If yes, we will probably take it on. If not, we'll think about why, why people don't like it, and think about the other ways that we might be able to do that instead.

[00:07:08] Zack Katz: So when you say it's more of a familiar successor than a spiritual, I think the word spiritual has, uh, the open source community and the WordPress community has, has been trying to parse what, what that, what is meant by that.

[00:07:20] So your goal w was to make it familiar for people who were migrating from WordPress to EmDash. Not so much to, uh, a, a bigger question of, um, the, the nature of WordPress itself, just like the interface and the, the concepts and the structure of EmDash. Would be something that you could transfer the knowledge of how, how to use the,

[00:07:43] Matt "TK" Taylor: yeah, I, I think that's a key part of it is that we know there's a lot of people that are very familiar with the WordPress interface posts pages.

[00:07:52] The way it kind of like fundamentally ties together. You know, we've, um, been inspired by the, the role system in WordPress and mm-hmm. That is identical, you know. Um, but at the same time, I think there's something that WordPress was to a lot of. Developers in the kind of early days of its growth, where it was the kind of stumbling block that you would run through and FTPing it onto a server, et cetera, right, to learn programming and play around with databases and content management, because that was the kind of defacto standard, and I think like as.

[00:08:31] You have an entirely new generation of people kind of entering the internet and building things on the internet, especially with the advent of agents, and that was obviously a huge part of EmDash. I'm sure we can talk about, um. I don't think WordPress is really the tool of choice for those, those kinds of users.

[00:08:49] And often it's things like Astro that are promoted as, oh, build a site with Astro. But then where is that kind of like word pressy element that enables you to pull together some content user database, like, you know, make some of the. Bits that you don't really want to spend loads of tokens on, or you don't really want to be hacking around in the HTML or markdown files to do much, much easier.

[00:09:13] And I think that that was a key component of what you're building here, is it's this really extensible system that sits on top of a lot of very modern technology to do the thing that WordPress would do, but is actually not very well suited for at this point in time.

[00:09:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Interesting. I think one, um, thing that, um, stood out when what Zack was leaning on a little bit, the, the idea of the spiritual successor, um, was that one of the things that's really important to the WordPress ecosystem is the way WordPress allows you to own your own content.

[00:09:49] Um, and to, for that content to be portable. Um, and it kind of. Feels different with EmDash since it seems to be at the moment. Very, um, Cloudflare Pages specific. Um, is that also intentional and is there a plan to, um, allow EmDash to be installed in any host or anything like that?

[00:10:12] Matt Kane: To, to be clear what the EmDash is able to be installed anywhere that Astro can be installed, which is.

[00:10:21] Most places, it is by default, a pure node JS app. You can run it as a node. Um, and people, you know, we've got official stuff already in there talking about how to deploy it to, to railway. It's, and, and it works on, people have deployed it to CEL and to Netlify. The, we built it. With Cloudflare in mind because we work at Cloudflare.

[00:10:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:48] Matt Kane: But at the same time, you know my, I have been working in open source for a very long time. I've been building web frameworks for like, over about six years now. So before Astro I was working on Gatsby, if people may remember that. And. I am very much, you know, I'm very, very keen to make sure that this works everywhere.

[00:11:11] 'cause that's one of the great beauties of WordPress is that you can stick it on a $5 VPS somewhere and it will, it will work. But the, what the idea here is that the thing that we were super, super keen that this was gonna be able to do is run in a serverless environment. So, you know, it should be able to run in an AWS Lambda, it should be able to run on a, um, on netlify functions or versal.

[00:11:35] Or Cloudflare workers, and this was the idea is we wanted this to be as portable as possible. Now there are features in there which only work on WordPress. On, on only work on on Cloudflare.

[00:11:47] Zack Katz: Yeah.

[00:11:48] Matt Kane: But um. We, this is not an inherent thing on them. This is not something that we have deliberately done. This is because they are using things that are, um, only available on the word prep on the Cloudflare platform.

[00:12:01] I'm gonna keep making that mistake. Um, and, but. But we are, you know, our users are c the community that suddenly sprung up in the last week are already, you know, tackling those problems. And I, you know, we are very, very happy that they are doing this. Yeah. 'cause, you know, to make this clear to, to make this as clear as we can, we want everyone to be able to run this everywhere.

[00:12:24] Okay. You know, we are not using this as a thing to try and lock people into Cloudflare because No, no CMS is gonna succeed if that's what they're doing.

[00:12:33] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. You

[00:12:34] Matt Kane: know, nobody is going to want to deploy something that only runs on Cloudflare.

[00:12:39] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:12:39] Matt Kane: We want people to deploy to Cloudflare because we think Cloudflare is a fantastic platform and provides lots of things outta the box that other platforms don't provide.

[00:12:46] But at the same time, if you want to run this on your $5 VPS. You can, you can deploy it as a note JS app and it will work on, um, on your same VPS that you are running PHP on or you know, you can put it in a docker image or what, or whatever. Yeah. And this is very much what we want to make clear and, you know, the initial.

[00:13:08] S talk has been all about Cloudflare because, you know it is a Cloudflare project. Yeah. It has been built by Cloudflare, but we don't want that to be where it goes. So this is why we've created it in a separate like GitHub organization. We've got a separate, separate Discord community because we want to be able to take this further.

[00:13:25] So it is started as a Cloudflare project and it runs particularly well on Cloudflare, but we want it to go beyond Cloudflare and we want it to be, um, um, accessible to everybody.

[00:13:35] Zack Katz: So one of the questions, uh, sorry, uh, is about plugin sandboxing. That's one of the main features that EmDash launched with is saying that, that, that, that is one of the problems with WordPress is that plugins have the ability to bring down a site or like they have too much scope of like, uh, in terms of what they can do on the website.

[00:13:53] So, um, will that, are there plans to make that, uh, non-exclusive to Cloudflare?

[00:14:01] Matt Kane: There are not just plans, there are people working on it at the moment. This is, this is something that we knew would happen straight away. It was one thing that it, I would've implemented it. Like at launch, if I could have done it without like, huge amounts of work.

[00:14:16] Yeah.

[00:14:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:14:16] Matt Kane: This has been a big, big, big thing to work on. You know, I did implement as much on, on Node that I could easily, I was hoping that people could jump into it. I spoken to some of the people on, uh, work at Cloudflare who are. No JS maintainers who have got, you know, deep knowledge in there. And there are people in our Discord community now who are tackling this from several different angles.

[00:14:43] They've got thoughts about different ways that this could be run. The thing is the dynamic workers that we are using for this from Cloudflare are just particularly well suited for it. They weren't created for this, they were created mainly to be able to run AI generated codes in a secure sandbox. But while I was, you know, one of the first things I was thinking about when I was thinking how am I going to design this as a, you know, as a product and a platform you.

[00:15:11] Is how are plugins going to work? Because, you know, we all know that plugins are what makes WordPress, you know, that is, that is the thing that defines WordPress and what makes it such a huge success. So the big thing that I had to think is how are we going to make work plugins work well on this? Because, you know, we, we know also that they are.

[00:15:34] WordPress is greatest failing in terms of, in terms of security, in terms of, you know, the many, many issues that come from it. So I wanted to think about a way that we could do this better and I immediately just suddenly thought, wait a second, we've got this, this product that would be absolutely perfect for it.

[00:15:52] And I. Uh, when I implemented that, I made sure that I, it worked without it. So you can run it without the sandboxing. Yeah. But I wanted it to be possible to use this as a, as a thing that was going to be, um, that was going to be secure and sandboxed. So, you know, I want everybody to be able to run it on sandbox because apart from anything, it just makes it a lot easier to be able to have this, these plugin marketplaces and things like that.

[00:16:17] As it stands, it's, it's Cloudflare only for there. But, you know, look from the speed of development that's going on in the repo at the moment, I imagine that there will be something next week that's gonna be working with working that's gonna run on notes. So, you know, watch this space.

[00:16:30] Matt Cromwell: It has been really amazing to see so much activity on that repo, on the several of the repos, um, o overnight almost.

[00:16:37] Um, TK you were gonna chime in a minute ago. I didn't, we

[00:16:41] Matt "TK" Taylor: Yeah. I, I was just gonna add to, uh, to Matt's point that, um, dynamic workers is an awesome primitive, and I think. The way that Cloudflare's kind of dx through bindings in your worker makes all of that stuff really accessible is really kind of like our big selling point.

[00:16:57] Um, and of course like how that works with EmDash is really like sensible and unique as well. But this is not like a unique thing that Cloudflare will only be able to do in the future. I'm sure there are lots of companies that are working on the same kind of thing because Asmat says. The kind of future of this, uh, dynamic workers proposition is really not EmDash at all.

[00:17:18] It's and plugins at all. It is all base baked into how we need somewhere that is secure and isolated to run AI generated code. Yeah. And lots and lots and lots of places have that same problem. So I think the, the problem space, as Matt says, it's being worked on and there'll be other solutions that come out for sure.

[00:17:35] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I think related to that, um. You know, I, I, I think you all nail, um, narrowed in on the fact that yes, the plugin ecosystem in WordPress is what makes WordPress successful, but it also is the biggest vector, uh, from a security perspective for sure. Um, but at the same time. Um, it's hard to imagine having the ability to customize your website, um, when the, if, if a plugin was restricted from interacting with the database or things like that.

[00:18:06] Um, can you speak a little bit to that? Because, uh, I'm having a hard time like. One plugin I install on every single WordPress website is a user role editor. It basically lets me customize my users to have different capabilities and roles and things like that. I'm not sure something like that would be possible on EmDash, um, for example, uh, because of the sandbox nature.

[00:18:28] Um, can you, can you speak a little bit to that and what, what, what do you lose when, um, with this approach essentially?

[00:18:35] Matt Kane: So I think the, probably the best analog to think of for the, for the way that the plugins work here are mobile apps. So the points that these, that we've done with these plugins is we still give them capabilities, but those capabilities are.

[00:18:51] Limited and granular, and they are defined at install time. So if you are installing something that is calling a web hook when you are publishing something, then you know that it does want to be able to access any, anywhere on the internet so that it's able to, you know, um, hit an arbitrary endpoint. But if you are doing something that is supposed to be adding a banner into your, you know, into your page, you shouldn't, it shouldn't be something that is able to access the internet independently.

[00:19:20] Why? Why should it be doing that? And equally, it shouldn't be able to access your database and it shouldn't be able to access your emails. But if you are installing, uh, a plugin that is an email provider. Then you want it to be able to have access to emails, but probably doesn't need access to, you know, user accounts for example.

[00:19:38] But the idea here is that these may have lots of capabilities, but they are granular and they can be granted where they are needed. And I think this is the point, is that if the, the, the most of the issues that you get with plugins are about them. Grabbing much more, um, use much more capabilities than they, than they should have.

[00:20:02] And the problem with the WordPress is there's no way of limiting that. As soon as any plugin that you install, your little sale banner can go in there and, you know, exfiltrate your entire user database. Yeah. And can, you know, pull out your products and everything. Whereas with EmDash, you, you know, you know what you're getting when you install it and you know it will.

[00:20:21] It will have very specified, um, uh, capabilities that it's able to, that it's able to do. And, um, it has, and if it's, um, if it's contacting the internet, you can have it that it's limited to specific hosts. And, um, we, you know, we've launched with a particular set of, um, capabilities and APIs that they have.

[00:20:43] But, you know, at the moment there are dozens of people already in, in the, um, EmDash discord that are. Planning their plugins that they're working on and, but also bringing up things about, you know, what, which hooks are missing and which capabilities are missing and which ones that they want to add. So, you know, we are at a very, very early stage here.

[00:21:03] Yeah. You know, it is literally one week since we launch this

[00:21:05] Matt Cromwell: thing. Yeah.

[00:21:06] Matt Kane: But we are able to add these, these things and, you know, every piece that we've added, we've thought really carefully about how we can do this in a secure way. Yeah. So, for example, we do allow them to generate. User interface in the, in the admin panel.

[00:21:22] Now that could, in theory be a risky thing to do because, you know, if you are generating UI, you might be able to use it to, to, um, access user data. So we have generated, we've used a language that is similar to Slack's block kit that allows you to. Define user interface in a way that is secure. Mm-hmm. And then we've also provided APIs for injecting, um, meta tags into the head and tags into the footer.

[00:21:48] But they are, things you could inject are limited, so they are very specific. So you can't, you know, you're not able to in, um, if you've. If you granted something that is, that you want to be able to inject analytics, it's not gonna be able to inject other things that are not supposed to be in there. So this is, this is the, the point about it.

[00:22:04] It's not about making it so that these are, you know, these, these are plugins that can't do anything. It's about making sure that they're plugins that do the thing that they're supposed to be doing, and not more than that.

[00:22:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:22:16] Matt "TK" Taylor: I also think there's a, there's a completely different angle, sorry, Cromwell to, to just jump on your point.

[00:22:20] It's like if you're installing a plugin on every site that you encounter, I think some of the things that we've tried out with EmDash is thinking, well, everyone installs, like these SEO plugins, everyone installs a roll plugin, let's say, right?

[00:22:33] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:22:33] Matt "TK" Taylor: Maybe some of these things in WordPress's time were just not considered as part of core development because.

[00:22:40] These plugins exist and this ecosystem exists, and we want to support that, that plugin ecosystem. But should those things really be plugins, the ability to say what an editor has access to do, or a subscriber has access to do or whatever, right? These feel like capabilities that should just generally exist.

[00:22:56] So I do think there's an opportunity in EmDash two rethink the kinds of things that typically might have been a plugin. Yeah. And say. Should that be core, like we've got rid effectively of a lot of what, um, advanced custom fields did for WordPress by just allowing you to define different content types and, and set the properties that exist for those content types.

[00:23:16] I, it, it seems odd to me that WordPress has not addressed these things for the many years it's been alive. Um, and I think it is really good opportunity to rethink.

[00:23:28] Zack Katz: Um, I think TK froze up there.

[00:23:30] Matt Kane: We lost lost TK. I was gonna, I was gonna add a, a thing to there. That was quite a nice, um. That was quite a nice detail on, on that because as, as TK was, was hinting about there.

[00:23:42] We, we have a lot of the SEO things built in. Um, I merged a, a PR into our repo yesterday. That, um, added, that improved the way that the OG images were, um, injected for, for in the SEO, um, fields that, uh, that PR was authored by Yost, the creator of Yost. Yeah. Yeah. So his, you know, this is, this is the kind of, you know, the, his, his entire plugin was based on the fact that this was effectively something that was missing from

[00:24:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:24:15] Matt Kane: Um, from there. But he has also created a plugin that adds the extra bits of SEO that you don't need, necessarily need everywhere. And I think that's kind of the, the, the approach that we want to take to this is think about exactly which bits does do basically every single site need and then put those in the core, but, but still leave things in plugins that are not going to be needed by every single person.

[00:24:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:24:38] Zack Katz: So one question that brings up is, uh, governance and how EmDash will be managed moving forward. Uh, can you talk about how you see that happening?

[00:24:49] Matt "TK" Taylor: I think Matt could probably talk a bit to it because, um, yeah, he's, he's done a lot more in open source previously, but I would also just point to we one weekend where, yeah, you saw

[00:24:57] Zack Katz: Scrambled talked briefly about, about the future of EmDash from that regard.

[00:25:01] Yeah. Since that is one of the questions regarding WordPress, uh, community. Mm-hmm.

[00:25:06] Matt Kane: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I. I, I'm, I would be lying if this wasn't something that was, you know, quite high on my mind at the moment. Yeah. Um, as, as, um, as TK said, I do have, you know, and I, as I hinted before, I've got, you know, got quite a lot of experience in, um, uh, open source maintenance for, you know, particularly for large projects.

[00:25:26] This has obviously been built out as a project from Cloudflare, but it's always been something where we have. Wanted it to be something that would be like part a community thing. So this is why we have not launched it. As you know, it's not on github.com/um Cloudflare. It's github.com/m-cms Now. One, the, that side of the, um, the, the governance is one thing.

[00:25:56] We've obviously there is the whole thing of an open source project and the governance and the who roles are and all that kind of thing. At the moment, that is me going, oh my God, I have got like a hundred PRS open and I've merged 20 today and there's another 30 that have opened. Um, who am I gonna, you know, bring on board to do that?

[00:26:14] That at the moment is. You know, to be determined, but I think there is also the technical side of it as well. So, for example, you know, there is the, one of the ways that the governance is obviously an issue with, with WordPress is, is the, the plugin store. You know, that is a. You know, a key, A key part.

[00:26:35] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:26:35] Matt Kane: What we want to do is do a distributed plugin store, and there's some really, really interesting conversations going in on, in Discord and GitHub at the moment about how that could be architected. And we've been looking at the fair proposal, which, you know, was one of the things that was proposed for, for WordPress plugins, that there's some interesting things in there.

[00:26:55] But the o one of the other things we've done is that, you know, by there is the, we've published the plugin, the plugin marketplace is, is in, you know, is in the monorepo and it's open source and anyone can use it and host their own. But I'm still not happy with it at the moment. 'cause what I want is for everybody to be able to publish all of them and them to all be federated together.

[00:27:15] And, you know, I think that's, that's where I see that one going.

[00:27:19] Matt Cromwell: That's interesting. Uh, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that specifically 'cause we only have a few more minutes left. Um, uh, but anything you can say about the plugin marketplace, the theme marketplace, um, TK you saw, I put a discussion up there about.

[00:27:35] Parent themes and child themes, that is something that actually was a big deal in the WordPress space. And, and the, the mindset there is that, uh, if I am a product person and I ship a, a theme that works great with Astro and EmDash, um, I want, uh, folks to be able to customize things without messing up the core.

[00:27:55] Theme files and things like that. That's something that's been, um, a big aspect of WordPress for a long time, but that might not be the way forward. Uh, when it comes to theme, a theme marketplace in EmDash. Um, any details you can provide for our audience about like what opportunities there are, uh, for, uh, products, um, on EmDash.

[00:28:15] Matt "TK" Taylor: Yeah, I mean, themes are certainly challenging. It's early days. Um, but as you'll understand from the architecture, uh, Astro works very differently. EmDash works very differently. So the idea of a theme in kind of astro pilots is really just a, a site in its own right. And, um, yeah, you'll have seen from some of the examples that we've produced, right?

[00:28:35] We have, uh, three entirely different sites that the only commonality. Is that they all import the same API in order to bring their posts and pages in, and they have this EmDash plugin in order for the administration interface to exist. Um, so I think there's a, you know, a huge opportunity for folks to work on.

[00:28:56] Um, you know, what has been a kind of large, you know, astro community that are building themes for Astro to think about, okay, what does a theme for EmDash look like? What does a site for EmDash look like? Um, in terms of like customization. I think, Matt, you can obviously speak a bit more to this as well.

[00:29:16] Like, there's, there's possibly opportunities where, um, the, the. Site itself could expose things that could be changed in the administration panel. But I think we're a very long way from something like an Elementor or like, you know, full site editing. The, the direction that kind of WordPress is going, I think is quite counter to.

[00:29:35] Not only kind of like where EmDash architecturally is kind of at this point in time, but also possibly where the internet is going at this point in time with the ability for you to kind of conjure up a site or modify a site just by talking to a, an AI agent, right? Rather than you having to go through multiple panels and drag options around and things like that.

[00:29:55] Um, it certainly seems to me that as time goes on, that kind of stuff is just gonna get easier and easier and easier and cheaper and. Really the different differentiating factor at that point is this kind of like system in the back. Um, and how does that work?

[00:30:10] Matt Cromwell: Hmm. And what about the plugin marketplace? Um, is there a monetization aspect that's being considered at all?

[00:30:18] Like again, of course we know you're ve version 0.1, so, but any kinds of thoughts and ideas about where that's heading Overall?

[00:30:27] Matt "TK" Taylor: We've definitely had some folks talk to us and, um, kind of reach out and, you know, they're commercial entities and they're interested in kind of being, you know, first to EmDash and showing that they can produce something.

[00:30:39] Um, you know, we have, uh, the most common obvious example of this, uh, kind of email providers, right? So if you want to send an email with EmDash, you're going to need an email provider. And some email providers have already stepped up and said, here is a. You know, extension that allows you to do that. And the result of that right, is you'll need an API key from that email provider, and if you go over whatever their free allocation is, you'll be, uh, spending money with them.

[00:31:05] So that's, that's a benefit I think from that perspective. I think the other angle of like EmDash being MIT licensed and that effectively meaning that the plugins can be licensed in a different way as well, possibly opens up that market a bit more, but really interested to see how, how that evolves further as time goes on.

[00:31:20] Matt Kane: Yeah, but we would very much like people to be able, able to build businesses on top of, on top of EmDash. You know, the, the MIT licensing thing is one of those, one of those parts of it. And I know that, you know, I'm a, I'm an old school open source advocate. You know, I've been building open source things for like.

[00:31:38] Well, nearly 30 years now, but I know that the GPL has causes issues for a lot of people, particularly people who are trying to sell themes and plugins and, you know, it's, it's obviously a great bone of contention in there, but we were very keen that we wanted to use the MIT license to give people more flexibility about how they are publishing these things.

[00:31:58] And our existing marketplace doesn't have built in support for monetization, but we would love people to be able to do that. This is something that we. You know, we love the way that, you know, for that people have built these businesses on top of it. And I think that we would like to be able to give people the, the kind of flexibility that say a Shopify marketplace is able to give.

[00:32:19] And, um, and we, but equally for, from the marketplace perspective, we aren't wanting to be competing with the, the hosting platform. So we are not planning to be a, a managed hosting provider either. What we are doing is we want to provide you the tools so that you can do that. And absolutely, amazingly, somebody has already launched a hosting platform for EmDash this week.

[00:32:43] Bet using the tools. That's amazing. We provided and that's like, you know, this is, that's the perfect thing that we want. That is what we want to do at this. 'cause Cloudflare does isn't, that's not our business. We don't do managed hosting. Yeah. We provide the infrastructure for most of the managed hosts out there.

[00:32:57] So most of the WordPress hosts that you know are using Cloudflare in some form. So. This is what, you know, this is where we see ourselves fitting within this ecosystem is providing, providing the tools for, for everybody else who wants to build a business and make lots of money and build some amazing sites on it.

[00:33:14] Zack Katz: And can you talk, I, I know, I know we're at time, but, uh, could I, I'm sure this question has come up a lot. Uh, can you speak to Cloudflare's commitment to EmDash? Because WordPress has been around for 20 years and I know that people are concerned about if this is a fad or something in the internally, a Cloudflare.

[00:33:31] Matt Kane: I think if you asked, and Matt has like, yeah, sorry. If you, if you asked us, and Matt has

[00:33:35] Matt "TK" Taylor: absolutely no q2.

[00:33:37] Matt Kane: Exactly. If, if you'd asked us two weeks ago, we would've said, we're gonna see how it goes. You know, we want the, we want to see what's going on. Before, before Mark, you know, my Q2 roadmap has been like question mark.

[00:33:51] Um, and, um. Obviously the response has been incredible. You know, we have blown away every possible expectation that I could have had from this. So there is clearly a massive demand for that, and that has not gone unnoticed internally. So basically at the moment, the answer is we are trying to work out how, but the clear point is that this is something that a lot of people want to be using.

[00:34:13] So we would be crazy to not be resourcing this. Yeah. So, you know, at the moment we have got a sort of semi roadmap for the way that we are gonna be building this over the. Over the next six to 12 months. But it's not, you know, at the moment all we can say is, yes, this is, people want to build with this and we want to help people build with it as well.

[00:34:32] Yeah. But equally we want to see how we can build this community as well to make it something that, you know, lots of WordPress developers and astro developers and you know, any other web developers or who, somebody who's just. Downloaded clawed and is trying, trying it out, are I going to be able to build things for, 'cause you know, I think it's a golden age of web development at the moment, and this is, I want this to be the CMS that people are using.

[00:34:56] Matt "TK" Taylor: Yeah,

[00:34:56] Matt Cromwell: that's

[00:34:56] Matt "TK" Taylor: excellent. Yeah, this is gone spectacularly well for us and I, I think it would be, uh, crazy if we don't spend a lot more time on it. And there's a lot, a lot interest internally about how we, uh, how we make this, make this a really big thing.

[00:35:08] Matt Cromwell: That's awesome. Well, I really appreciate your time. We close every single episode out with our best advice, and I'd love to hear from you two.

[00:35:16] Uh, what is your best advice to plugin authors or theme authors out there who are considering EmDash? Um, what would you tell them as a nutshell? Best advice, uh, TK, you want to go first?

[00:35:30] Matt "TK" Taylor: Um, come say hello. We, we are, we are very, very approachable. We're on the discord on a daily basis. Um, Matt's, I mean, fainting as he files through hundreds of issues and, uh, um, pull requests.

[00:35:44] Um, but we are really, really open. I think the community that we're building is fantastic. So I just, I would love to see more people as a part of that. And I think a big thing that we are looking for now. Is people who want to build something, you know, a bit unique, a bit novel, and don't quite have the hooks and capabilities available for them from the system yet to build that as a sandbox plugin and want to help us build those things.

[00:36:06] 'cause I think the more hooks that we have, the more clear it will be to other people. Oh, okay, this is how I put a plugin together. It is like a kind of app store in terms of the permission model, et cetera. It does make a lot more sense. I think that's really where we wanna see people contributing.

[00:36:20] Matt Kane: Love it.

[00:36:20] Yeah, I mean, the, my, my thing, my tip would be you are in the ground floor here. You have got the opportunity to shape the way that this, um, the way that this forms. But you have also got the ability to build the great, you know, blockbuster plugin for EmDash because you are right there at the beginning. So.

[00:36:41] Do. Come in, try it out. Tell us what you want from the plugin system and what you want from EmDash and we are wanting to help you do this 'cause we are not wanting to compete with you. We want to, you know, we want to help you out.

[00:36:56] Matt Cromwell: That's excellent. Well, I appreciate both of your time a lot. Uh, folks, if you are here, we're gonna say goodbye to Matt and TK and Zack and I might just chat a little bit.

[00:37:06] Um, uh, and, uh, but again, thank you so much for your time and for joining us. Um, and uh, we will be in touch for sure. Well, thanks for having us on your show. Thanks.

[00:37:17] Matt "TK" Taylor: Thanks so much for the invitation.

[00:37:18] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Have a good one.

[00:37:20] Zack Katz: Alright, bye.

[00:37:23] Matt Cromwell: Zack,

[00:37:24] Zack Katz: Matt Cromwell,

[00:37:27] Matt Cromwell: Cromwell, um, what's your take? How was it?

[00:37:31] Zack Katz: Uh, very interesting.

[00:37:32] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:37:32] Zack Katz: Yeah. Uh, it seems like it went from zero to a thousand miles per hour. Yeah. Uh, that was really cool that they, it was interesting to hear that they hadn't necessarily planned for such a great response, but that they're also open to.

[00:37:48] To taking, to, responding to it in kind and, and allocating more resources like

[00:37:53] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:37:54] Zack Katz: You know, one of the, there's, there have been a lot of criticisms about, um. WordPress, this WordPress that isn't WordPress great. And yeah, WordPress is great. WordPress is the community. And I think a lot about the community is how you respond to feedback.

[00:38:08] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:38:09] Zack Katz: And I was heartened to hear that they have a open door policy where you just go on Discord and talk about what you want and maybe actually get a PR merged in decor. Like that is something that, uh, I haven't tried merging anything in 10 years because

[00:38:25] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:38:25] Zack Katz: Uh, it's a nightmare in WordPress. So. You know, I think a lot of the energy that goes into plugins in WordPress might be going into core for EmDash, like

[00:38:36] Matt Cromwell: Mm.

[00:38:36] Zack Katz: Wouldn't that be interesting?

[00:38:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Really interesting. I mean, obviously their success is a big signal, um, and does mean a lot of things. It's so funny to that, having had a lot of conversations with new. Plugin authors over the years, um, they often are like, oh, you know, back in the day you launched a plugin on.org and you had success 'cause people could find you right away and adopt your plugin really quickly.

[00:39:02] And now it's not like that anymore. Well, geez, it absolutely is like that on EmDash right now. Like it's absolutely like a bit of a gold rush moment. Um, uh, and that's what they were saying at the end there. Matt in particular Matt Cain was saying like. Where you could fill that spot. You could be the yo SEO of EmDash if you just like get the plugin out there right now.

[00:39:24] Um, which is seems incredible potentially. Of course.

[00:39:28] Zack Katz: Yeah. And it comes down to execution. And if you wanna know about execution, check out WP Product Dog. We talk a lot about how to make a product successful, but like. Anybody can, I've burned a billion tokens, I think, on an EmDash plugin suite already.

[00:39:42] Matt Cromwell: Oh, wow.

[00:39:42] Zack Katz: Uh, that does, you know, everything from uh, gravity kit, stuff like form displaying and like, uh, event management, um, membership stuff just to see what's going on. Um, our friend Jason, uh, with, um,

[00:39:56] Matt Cromwell: Jason Coleman.

[00:39:57] Zack Katz: Jason Coleman with Paid Membership Pro has a paid membership Pro plugin already.

[00:40:01] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:40:02] Zack Katz: Like. It's, it's not about the code.

[00:40:04] 'cause the whole point of EmDash is anybody can make this code. It's about executing and Yeah, and launching and marketing and getting people to use it and pay for it. Like that's a really exciting blue sky opportunity. A

[00:40:15] Matt Cromwell: hundred percent.

[00:40:16] Zack Katz: How, how are you thinking about the execution on EmDash

[00:40:20] Matt Cromwell: I, I mean. I, I think that WordPress is going to continue to be, um, the website builder of choice for a lot of businesses and organizations.

[00:40:32] Um, and I think EmDash right now looks like a really interesting alternative. Um, I think their bullishness about their approach, um, to their ar, to their stack, their architecture is interesting. Um, and if they are right about that, then yeah, like things have to change with WordPress. But the thing is like.

[00:40:53] WordPress is changing very rapidly in, in WordPress terms, like, uh, our ability to adopt more AI forward. Uh, things in WordPress core is, it's the fastest development I've ever seen in WordPress. Yeah. But it's half of the pace of. Everything that's happening in AI at the moment, like we're, we're going faster than ever, but it's still slow.

[00:41:16] Uh, basically. Um, so I how EmDash goes from V 0.1 to version one is really gonna be the real take and how WordPress, uh, isn't like what, what yo said in his article isn't just. AI compatible, but becomes AI native. Um, if WordPress can become AI native, I don't even know. Um, I'm not sure, but how WordPress does adopts AI and how MDE goes to V one, those are the big tests for me.

[00:41:48] Um, and I think that. Once both of those things are fully realized, you're gonna see it's really kind of like an apples and oranges situation, not a apples and anvils situation, you know? Uh, I don't know if that makes sense. I use that, I use that analogy a lot. They're, they're more similar. Um, they're not more different.

[00:42:07] Um.

[00:42:08] Zack Katz: Yeah, like one of the things that Matt was saying was that he, he wanted to have a concept of security that is more like a mobile phone app. And the permission structure of mobile phones, uh, are really limiting. And there's a reason that people still use desktop computers for a lot of things.

[00:42:25] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:42:25] True.

[00:42:25] Zack Katz: And there's so many things you can't do on a phone that are really frustrating.

[00:42:29] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:42:29] Zack Katz: Uh, that people use a desktop computer for and another. Thing about that is when you use a application on your phone, it progressively asks you, can I ask a access your specific contact list? Now after you've onboarded, maybe now you need contact access.

[00:42:45] Mm-hmm. Maybe now you, so like. I'm sure this will get worked out, but that one of the things that came up to for me is like, well, he said where, uh, where you need access, but not when you need access. Mm-hmm. And I think like that kind of flexibility is going to be being needed to be worked out.

[00:42:59] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. And that's interesting because you bring up what Matt Mullenweg has mentioned several times that he wants WordPress to be the operating system of the web.

[00:43:06] Zack Katz: Right.

[00:43:07] Matt Cromwell: Um, you know, if they're the mobile apps of the web, but WordPress is the operating system of the web. That's really interesting. Um, and, and. I mean, I could see it working that way. Um, again, if WordPress really adopts AI in a way that is meaningful, um, and not just a attack on, so,

[00:43:26] Zack Katz: yeah, I mean, I, I do appreciate that Matt took 7.0 by the reins.

[00:43:31] I wish he had. Let, let them release 7.0. Uh, well, anyway, my, my point, the ai, you, you

[00:43:39] Matt Cromwell: can say what you wanna say, Zack.

[00:43:40] Zack Katz: No. There are, the AI being pushed into WordPress aggressively is the right move.

[00:43:46] Matt Cromwell: Yes.

[00:43:46] Zack Katz: Um, and I think there needs to be more unilateral decision making to make sure that WordPress keeps up because

[00:43:52] Matt Cromwell: ironically Yes.

[00:43:53] Zack Katz: Yeah. And that requires, uh, moving quickly, making decisions. And maybe you get it wrong, but we could revert that later. But like WordPress's, uh, structure, um, does not inherently mean that it's not good for ai. AI has trained on WordPress, uh, for years. It's just that there's a lot of new code that needs to be better documented and like the focus needs to be on making AI a better experience.

[00:44:17] Making WordPress is a better experience for ai, and I think EmDash is gonna kick WordPress in the pants. Um, and get us really focused on how to improve. And I'm excited about that.

[00:44:28] Matt Cromwell: I wanted to see, we had a lot of comments that we didn't pay attention to at all. Um, I wanted to see if we might highlight a couple.

[00:44:34] Um. Here's one from a user that, um, B Green AZ is Cloudflare serious about putting in the work resources to maintain EmDash in a viable open source platform? What plans do you have to foster sustained community after initial buzz? Subsides. That's the question you asked at to end

[00:44:52] Zack Katz: and I was really glad that they, uh, are addressing.

[00:44:55] I was also really glad to hear that Matthew Prince was the person who it was top down.

[00:45:00] Matt Cromwell: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. That was, I love that they led with that. We were both curious about

[00:45:04] Zack Katz: that. I also wanted to dive into that a bit more and like. He said, you know, do WordPress, uh, but better be the there next

[00:45:11] Matt Cromwell: be the next WordPress.

[00:45:12] Zack Katz: Yeah. Uh, and that means a lot of different things. I wonder if he said that exact, like, what the exact words were,

[00:45:17] Matt Cromwell: because I feel like it had to have been those exact words be the next, how can you be the next WordPress?

[00:45:20] Zack Katz: Yeah. And then, uh, as a developer, Matt kind of seemed to have parsed that into like, well the data structures and stuff, um, and the community angles.

[00:45:29] Uh, there are so many different things that make up WordPress, and that was a lot of the feedback that we've been hearing after the release is like, well, WordPress is this, WordPress is that they didn't think about this. It seems like they're open to hearing and thinking and considering and moving forward, like it doesn't seem like it's flash in the pan.

[00:45:45] It seems like they're willing to put in the infrastructure.

[00:45:48] Matt Cromwell: What? I mean, it was interesting that they. Made it a big giant question mark. In the beginning, they were like, well, maybe nobody cares. Like maybe we this. It's a

[00:45:55] Zack Katz: big EmDash.

[00:45:56] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah. But clearly it's a,

[00:46:00] Zack Katz: yeah. Q2. Who knows, huh?

[00:46:02] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Ian Meisner is our co-host on WP Project.

[00:46:06] He's in the comments, he says, why will EmDash succeed at adding more to core while building and maintaining a healthy ecosystem where WordPress may have not? I don't know if that got addressed directly at all. Um, yeah, but it's a good question overall. Um,

[00:46:21] Zack Katz: I mean, I, I think the, the bureaucracy of maintaining open source hasn't hit them yet, which is a,

[00:46:27] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:46:27] Zack Katz: Which is, you know, and not just open source, but like AI generated prs, uh, the, the management of the prs and like, it sounds like they're about to scale up a lot and I think that. The attitude that we are at 0.1 0.0, like they can, they can make choices right now that they, that WordPress simply cannot.

[00:46:46] Yeah, because it's the, it's the Microsoft windows of, uh, open source. Where you have to maintain infinite, backward comparability. Yeah, because that's the ethos. You can't break anything,

[00:46:56] Matt Cromwell: which I love that ethos. Personally, I still think it's a strength, but you're right, it's also a huge burden.

[00:47:04] Zack Katz: A strength to, yeah.

[00:47:05] To what point, like the,

[00:47:06] Matt Cromwell: to what extent? Yes. I mean. It depends. Yeah. But, uh, Katie is also a co-host and she's in the comments here. She says, personally I'd rather wait until we know it will have a decent number of users, which, uh, I think she's saying that in the context of talking about, um, you know, whether she would make any of her products, uh, compatible with EmDash or not.

[00:47:31] Um, and that's a hundred percent a valid perspective. Why should we be. Jump in over there, um, if nobody's gonna be using it. Um, but like they said, um, you might miss the gold rush, honestly. Um. Because, uh, you know, there might be 25 different document library pros that get created between now and when you finally feel like there's a opportunity there.

[00:47:52] One more from Ian. Does a big host offer manage EmDash in the next two years? They already said it. They mentioned it. They said that. Well, I mean it, I don't know if it's a big host, but

[00:48:01] Matt "TK" Taylor: Right.

[00:48:01] Matt Cromwell: Somebody already launched, uh, an EmDash, um. Related, uh, hosting platform, uh, which I'm not surprised at all. Um, but I, I did think that their comments about the lock in was really interesting.

[00:48:13] Um, it, it definitely has a lot more potential for application when you can host your whole setup, um, in lots of different environments. I will say though, that like right now. Getting set up with a node hosting environment is, is a lot more challenging than, uh, a WordPress hosting environment. Um, it's not for the faint of heart.

[00:48:33] It's definitely very develop developer centric, which is why I think a managed hosting environment for EmDash makes the most sense because that's the only way you're gonna get it in front of the masses. You're not gonna have folks, um, installing their own node set up, um, uh, on a server. Um,

[00:48:50] Zack Katz: and honestly, the.

[00:48:53] I've been developing with EmDash locally and playing around with it and developing without their plugin. Sandbox has been fine. Like I've, mm-hmm. I've built out all the plugins that I talked about, like those were just developed locally and they work perfectly with a local environment. So the lack of a sandbox just means.

[00:49:10] There's a little less security or something, so,

[00:49:12] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:49:13] Zack Katz: Um, I, I think coming from WordPress, that's not a real problem.

[00:49:17] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've, I played with it too. I posted last week, uh, a walkthrough of me trying to export my personal website from WordPress into EmDash locally. And I, overall, I, I had already experienced Astro before, um, and I felt like the CMS was just getting in the way.

[00:49:34] Like I just was like, I, I would much rather. I liked the importer. The importer was helpful and useful. It, it got everything set up locally and then I have everything there. Uh, but then I just could go to town with Cursor and Astro and I didn't need the, the CMS at all. Um, but, um, uh, Nick actually commented, um.

[00:49:53] Uh, you know this guy Nick, who I don't remember his name. Um, our friend Nick, um,

[00:49:59] Zack Katz: Diego.

[00:49:59] Matt Cromwell: Uh, I maybe, no, I don't know. Um, who, who, I give him a hard time every time I see him, um, that I don't know who he is. Um, and you're not helping me.

[00:50:08] Zack Katz: I'm sorry. I'm plaguing.

[00:50:09] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Well anyway, Nick was like, but is that because it's just a solo website?

[00:50:14] Um, and um, and you know, if you had a team of people working on the content, you would need the CMS more, and I was like, maybe potentially. Um,

[00:50:23] Zack Katz: well, I, I think that, that the release of EmDash with such a basic UI signals to me that they don't intend the UI to be the primary way of interacting with it. And they, they said, they said something to that extent.

[00:50:37] Um. Uh, to that effect on the call. And I think they anticipated being AI first, and that means, you know, instead of somebody logging into the CMS, maybe it is just AI talking with your cloud or like your AI provider.

[00:50:51] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:52] Zack Katz: Like the, the, the editor experience not great. Uh, but the data structure really good.

[00:50:57] So like, I, I do think that the, the focus for them on the, um, engineering side of things. Yeah. Um. Signals what their, uh, attitude is toward, like how that they aren't as concerned about. Yeah. People logging in. Maybe it's, uh, maybe it's just a headless, uh, experience to use WordPress

[00:51:18] Matt Cromwell: maybe. Yeah. It was interesting too that Scott Buscemi put in a PR to add Gutenberg into EmDash.

[00:51:25] I thought that was really funny.

[00:51:26] Zack Katz: And it was rejected 'cause of the license?

[00:51:28] Matt Cromwell: Because of the license. Exactly. They're like, ah, you know, the GPL is often called a viral license. Uh, as soon as it's in a project, it infects the rest of the whole project. Um, and that's by design and by intention. And that's why.

[00:51:43] Matt Mullenweg likes it so much. He is like, it is the licensing that forces open source, uh, to continue to be open source. Uh, but it is a perspective and it is an opinion of, of, uh, free code. Um, and clearly they are a lot more comfortable with MIT approach instead, uh, which is another perspective, another opinion, and it's valid.

[00:52:06] So,

[00:52:06] Zack Katz: and I've gotta say the WordPress, uh, world. Uh, like at Gravitate, we've just in the past few days, built CPS to better interact with a block editor at a per block basis. Uh, WordPress VIP has a plugin that allows, uh, structuring data in JSON format, not in the stupid HTML format, but, you know, the block editor saves things in that's easier for, uh, for AI to parse.

[00:52:29] You can use like Python and jq. Like it makes it a lot easier to interact with the data when it's not in HTM l comments. Mm-hmm. And I think WordPress is moving faster than ever before, like you were saying.

[00:52:40] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:52:40] Zack Katz: To make it something that is usable by ai. So I don't think WordPress is at a AI disadvantage personally.

[00:52:46] I think it's at a speed disadvantage. I think there is a structural. Question.

[00:52:52] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. But you can't, you can't just be in Claude or Cursor and say, post this article for me to my website. You can't do that right now. Yeah. But you can do that with Astro.

[00:53:02] Zack Katz: We absolutely do that.

[00:53:03] Matt Cromwell: I mean, you can. Yeah, you can, but it's not in core the that way currently.

[00:53:08] Um, and

[00:53:08] Zack Katz: but for EmDash is all about developer experience, right? Yeah. And for developers who are working with WordPress. It's pretty darn straightforward to, to make it so that your MCB can,

[00:53:17] Matt Cromwell: but yeah, you also can't just say, uh, redesign my homepage to be this way.

[00:53:23] Zack Katz: Well, you can't. It'll look like trash.

[00:53:24] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, you can.

[00:53:26] Yeah. You can't do it effectively. You can try. Um, but that's, that's what I mean though with Astro, um, you can do all those things really easily, really quickly, and it's because the architecture is set up in a way, the AI looks at it and is like, oh, I get exactly what's going on here. And can make all the changes happen automatically, so

[00:53:45] Zack Katz: we're not headless WordPress with an astro.

[00:53:48] Matt Cromwell: I've seen folks say that that's what they're doing instead. Um, it's basically using WordPress as the CMS and not the front end. Um, and I think it makes more and more sense that way. Um, but it makes like the power of WordPress, you know, very much minimized. You know, is it really just a content database?

[00:54:06] Is that really all it is? Um, it, and then it's like, if you're gonna do that, there's way leaner ways to have a content database than to use all of WordPress for that.

[00:54:15] Zack Katz: Right?

[00:54:15] Matt Cromwell: Um, but. Yeah.

[00:54:17] Zack Katz: Well, and for, for Gravity Kit, we are centering everything back into WordPress. Like fluent CRM is what we're using for our marketing Now, uh, you know, obviously Gravity forms, um, a lot of.

[00:54:29] A lot of our decisions have been to put everything into one database.

[00:54:33] Matt Cromwell: Nick, here's Nick, our friend Nick, who? I, I don't know this guy. I don't know him at all. I'm sorry,

[00:54:37] Zack Katz: Nick.

[00:54:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, Nick is the one who was telling me, uh, because I'm solo. Make me lonely, Nick. That's why I don't know you. Anyway, Nick, Nick Laughlin, good guy.

[00:54:46] Thanks for being here, Nick. Um, any other last comments? Best advice?

[00:54:50] Zack Katz: What's your best advice, man? Oh

[00:54:52] Matt Cromwell: man. My best advice is to pay freaking attention, folks, because it's all going so fast. Um, and there's so many things happening all the time, and it's not just noise. It's so many really. Hyper interesting things.

[00:55:08] I mean, there's a ton of noise too, which is difficult and, and challenging. But the way things are changing nowadays in WordPress, outside of WordPress, it's all relevant. Um, and if you're not paying attention, you really do start to miss out really quickly. Um, 'cause it, it also, all this, all these changes bring about new opportunity as well.

[00:55:28] Um, and being an early adopter, it has its benefits and strengths. Uh, the only way you can do that is if you're. Paying attention and are agile enough to be able to adjust on the fly. So, um, not that I'm saying that I'm the best at any of those things, but I, I, I'm, I, it makes me tired how much I'm having to pay attention and how much I have to feel like I'm adjusting all the time to the newest stuff that's, uh, available to us nowadays.

[00:55:55] Zack Katz: Yeah, I think, uh, you know, Yost, uh, with the WordPress hyphen, SEO slug on the plugin directory. That I don't think that was in the directory for like six years or something. It was, it yos didn't launch immediately. Uh,

[00:56:11] Matt Cromwell: yeah.

[00:56:12] Zack Katz: That I think there is time for us to, to wait and see. Uh, that's not what I'm suggesting anybody do.

[00:56:18] But I also like, it's, I'm, I feel such panic when things like this launch. Yeah. And then I realized like, okay, it's not first mover, it's best mover, apple's. Well, didn't create the first smartphone. It created the best smartphone. Like, and then changed the industry after that. So like,

[00:56:32] Matt Cromwell: yeah. But they're way behind on AI right now, and I'm not sure that they're gonna get up with the game, honestly.

[00:56:38] Zack Katz: Yeah. And it might have been the best move They've, they've not had to spend a hundred billion dollars on

[00:56:43] Matt Cromwell: True.

[00:56:43] Zack Katz: They could just license from Google and have all the benefits without any of the costs. So

[00:56:49] Matt Cromwell: potentially

[00:56:50] Zack Katz: so first mover advantage, maybe, maybe not. Um, but I do think my best advice is it comes down to fundamentals and like

[00:56:56] Matt Cromwell: mm-hmm.

[00:56:57] Zack Katz: If you believe you have what it takes to ship and deliver and really iterate and focus and market and have the connections and, you know. They, they were talking to hosting providers and big players in the email marketing it. It might be about connections right now and trying to make, trying to, you know, affect, influence.

[00:57:17] If you have the fundamentals, do it. Give it a go. But if not, you're okay to wait. That's my, that's my feeling.

[00:57:23] Matt Cromwell: Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, folks, we were actually on a break, um, because of Press Conf. Um, we squeeze this one in, as you could tell. Um, for really good reasons. We're on a break next week as well.

[00:57:35] Um, and then we're coming back with some more great content with more product owners. Um, I'm looking forward to next season for sure.

[00:57:42] Zack Katz: Hey, and if you're watching, do us a favor and hit like, and subscribe. Uh, it helps the show. And also thanks to Freemius for being our global, uh. Sponsor for WP Product Talk. Uh, frees helps you ship the, um,

[00:57:56] Matt Cromwell: we don't have the notes in front of

[00:57:58] Zack Katz: us.

[00:57:58] Well free. I, I'll tell you,

[00:57:59] Matt Cromwell: they're, they're a merchant of record.

[00:58:00] Zack Katz: They're a merchant of record. They do all the stuff the plugin owners need you to do. Uh, sure. Including tax compliance for global tax compliance, uh, distributing software. They do all this stuff that's hard, uh, for about selling products, and they make it easy.

[00:58:13] So,

[00:58:13] Matt Cromwell: and they even work with SaaS applications, not only WordPress folks. So if you're thinking about EmDash stuff. MIUs is still in the cards honestly,

[00:58:20] Zack Katz: and maybe Freemius should talk to EmDash and see if they could be, you know,

[00:58:24] Matt Cromwell: opportunity. I think

[00:58:25] Zack Katz: opportunity. Nice. Not knock over.

[00:58:28] Matt Cromwell: Alright folks, thanks so much.

[00:58:29] Zack Katz: Thanks everybody.

[00:58:30] Matt Cromwell: We'll see you next.