Reading up on WordPress
12 deep · digging since nov 21, 25
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now - Alexey Guzey
Alexey Guzey argues that starting a blog helps you think better and assist others, even if unoriginal or unread, and clarifies ideas.
- Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
Cloudflare launches EmDash, a serverless TypeScript CMS built on Astro that sandboxed plugins via Workers isolates to solve WordPress security issues while offering MIT licensing and x402 payments.
- Matt Mullenweg Assembles Trusted Group to Overhaul WordPress.org and Five for the Future
Matt Mullenweg created a #meta-janitors channel giving a trusted group direct production access to overhaul WordPress.org and the Five for the Future program without team approval.
- AI rewards strict APIs
Strict APIs with typed interfaces and validated schemas give AI agents tight feedback loops, reducing debugging and token costs, while loose APIs create ambiguity that slows agents down.
- The end of responsive images - Piccalilli
The new `sizes="auto"` HTML attribute, combined with `loading="lazy"`, lets browsers automatically determine the best image size to request, eliminating the need for manual `sizes` calculations.
- WordPress Everywhere
WordPress Playground now runs a full WordPress instance in-browser via WebAssembly, radically expanding where and how WordPress can be deployed.
- Just a moment...
WordPress.org now serves every page as Markdown via header or parameter, aiming to improve AI agent consumption and establish itself as a canonical knowledge source.
- Vibe Coding Without System Design is a Trap
AI-assisted coding lowers barriers to creation but risks shipping poorly-built products unless teams pair it with deliberate system design.
- 30 years of <br> tags
A retrospective on 30 years of web development, tracing the evolution from CGI scripts to modern frameworks, concluding the state of web development in 2025 is vastly improved.
- Messing with scraper bots
A developer built a Markov chain babbler in Rust to generate fake PHP files, feeding malicious scrapers junk data to waste their resources.
Takes
My SaaS portfolio will become fully self-hostable. And like also fully open-source too. It's something we're working on. And I've been thinking about what I would actually charge for if I open-sourced my SaaS products. I don't think I would feature gate them. So my options are basically narrowed down to: - Hosting I'm all for self-hosting, and I'd absolutely encourage users to self-host my products. But some people will still want the convenience of a one-click setup with managed backups, monitoring and updates. Offering hosting to those users is probably the easiest revenue model. Ghost has built a great business around exactly this. - Enterprise Maybe we get bigger customers. They'll need SSO, permissions, audit logs and compliance. That's basically the n8n enterprise model. - Support If a company depends on the software, having an SLA and somebody to call when stuff breaks is worth real money. Red Hat has done this for decades. - Integrations WordPress is the obvious example here. Selling integrations/plugins. Right now, all my products are heavily gated. Closed-sourced, paywall gated, and little accessible. But honestly, I'd happily give away the code if it meant more people adopted the product. Software is getting cheaper to build and easier to copy anyway. Quick overview 👇
@SimonHoiberg
I’ve spent the past 3 weeks trying to port a handful of WordPress sites to EmDash CMS, a new open source CMS from Cloudflare But it might all be for naught… I believe my love of Cloudflare + excitement for "the shiny new thing" blinded me towards what I really need for my business case After banging my head with build times, load times, etc I had to step back Now I’ve spent the a few hours today really challenging my assumptions and looking at other options like Payload CMS, SonicJS, and some git-based CMS solutions like Alinea and Sveltia I'm still not sure what I'll end up on, but I am excited about what we're building tl;dr I may have wasted TONS of time and thousands of dollars of engineering contractor time on my team for the wrong solution!! FML I've been hammering Opus 4.7 and Gstack’s skills to help me think it through, plus getting second opinions from Gemini and Codex. I'll try getting a second opinion on my PRD from GPT 5.5 too Happy Friday! Any suggestions appreciated
@nickgraynews