Matt is an open source developer from the UK. After a brief career as a baker and pastry chef, he's spent over 25 years building for the web. He is currently a core maintainer of the Astro web framework, and is the creator and lead maintainer of EmDash. Matt was previously a Gatsby core maintainer, has contributed to most JavaScript web frameworks, and has a sideline selling the world's fastest LED camera flash.
Workshop
Thursday 12 November
[ENG] Ship, Automate, Extend: A Hands-On EmDash CMS Workshop
In this two-hour workshop, you'll go from zero to a fully deployed, agent-powered CMS site, and learn how to extend it with your own plugins. We'll start by deploying an EmDash blog to production, covering configuration, content modeling, and the deployment pipeline. From there, we'll explore EmDash's agentic capabilities, using AI agents to configure and customize the site, and to generate, enrich, and manage content without manual busywork. Finally, we'll roll up our sleeves and build a custom plugin, covering the plugin lifecycle, APIs, and how to package and ship your extension.
Talk
11:40 · Developer Track
[ENG] Beyond WordPress: Building EmDash, a CMS for the Serverless and AI Era
WordPress powers 43% of the web but inherits a security model from 2003. When you install a WordPress plugin, you grant it unrestricted access to your database, filesystem, and user data. The result: 96% of WordPress security vulnerabilities originate in plugins. At Cloudflare, we asked: what would WordPress look like if built today? Our answer is EmDash — a full-stack TypeScript CMS powered by Astro and Cloudflare Workers. EmDash keeps what made WordPress successful (extensibility, plugin ecosystem, familiar admin UX) but rebuilds it on serverless, type-safe foundations. In this talk, Matt Kane (EmDash's lead engineer) and Matt Taylor (EmDash's product manager) explain how EmDash uses sandboxed Worker isolates to solve the fundamental security problem of plugin architectures, why Astro's content-driven approach makes it ideal for modern CMS frontends, and how we've designed EmDash to be AI-native from day one — complete with built-in MCP servers, agent skills, and x402 payments for the agentic web.