Cloudflare recently introduced EmDash, an open-source CMS designed around AI agents.

Its premise is that traditional CMS platforms were built for humans:

Humans open dashboards.

Humans install plugins.

Humans edit pages.

Humans hit publish and immediately notice the typo.

An AI-native CMS starts with a different assumption. The builder, administrator, or primary user might be an agent interacting through an MCP server or CLI.

That does not make EmDash a WordPress killer. WordPress has an ecosystem that cannot be recreated by announcing a GitHub repository and believing in yourself very hard.

But I think the architectural question is real.

Can WordPress become truly agent-native through plugins and new APIs?

Or will AI-native content management require systems designed from scratch around permissions, rollback, structured context, and machine-readable operations?

I covered EmDash, WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, and the wider CMS identity crisis in Episode 2 of Headless:

YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts

I’m especially curious what WordPress developers think.

Renovate the house?

Or admit it was built before electricity and start drawing new blueprints?

That sentence probably just caused several people to fall asleep or keep scrolling, but hear me out.

I’ve spent a pretty stupid amount of my career around CMSs, DXPs, Drupal, WordPress, headless platforms, agencies, and all the other ways we’ve invented to describe putting content on the internet.

And I realized there really wasn’t a weekly show I wanted to listen to that just covered what actually happened in this industry and why any of it matters.

So I decided to make it.

The first episode is about something I noticed happening across several announcements this week:

WordPress shipped 7.1.
Storyblok plugged into Claude.
Salesforce expanded Headless 360.
Optimizely is giving agents more control inside the CMS.
Contentful is talking about what happens when your website visitor isn’t human.

My takeaway is that we might be watching the CMS get an entirely new kind of user: AI agents. (I know... this might not be news to everyone here... but when I step out of my LinkedIn bubble... I realize there are a lot of people not following the signals)

And that could make structured content, APIs, permissions, metadata, and all the traditionally boring CMS stuff suddenly much more important.

Anyway.

I have no idea if this will become a thing.

But I’m going to try doing it every week, covering the interesting CMS/DXP news, having some opinions about it, making fun of our industry when deserved, and hopefully talking to some smart people along the way.

If that sounds interesting, here’s the first episode:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-cms-has-a-new-user-and-its-not-human/id6804680238?i=1000785544658
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1FG1olsK8yV0Q0y8LC0FqH?si=0UjSsl2MTgChoT1jRswNCg
YouTube: https://youtu.be/i5YJhz41EKY?si=wGUAStYgos1vH3hv

Would genuinely love feedback, especially from people who actually work in this world.

Including “your take is completely wrong.”

Honestly, that might make Episode 2 easier.