Because most WordPress users want to do it themselves.  (Image courtesy of LadyDIY from Pixabay)

Roger Montti, on Search Engine Journal, lists “6 Reasons Why Cloudflare’s EmDash Can’t Compete With WordPress” in this article, but really only needed one reason to explain why EmDash probably can’t compete with WordPress. (Assuming Cloudflare’s announcement wasn’t just an April Fools prank to begin with.)

1. EmDash Is Not User Focused
There are over 2,700 words in that announcement, and the only part that arguably has direct importance to actual users like bloggers, businesses, and other publishers is the part about plugin security. The rest of the content is developer- and coder-focused and not user-focused at all.
Montii said it here

I mean, sure, a lot of professional developers seem similarly interested in allowing users to interact with WordPress via change requests. And it’s true that ever since Gutenberg rolled out, core WP documentation increasingly includes the line “just open theme.json in your favorite IDE and…”

But here’s the thing: the PC took off because people wanted to run their own applications. Particularly their own spreadsheets, because spreadsheets were insanely faster and less expensive than sending batch requests to corporate mainframe sysops.

And it’s the same with websites. Roughly 450 million WordPress site owners flocked to WordPress because whatever its shortcomings (and there were plenty in 2005) it was insanely faster and less hassle than rawdogging posts, pages, menus, and sidebars in HTML. It’s great that the founders of Sucuri and Yoast are moving to programmatic solutions for their websites, but they can do that because they’re successful and very sophisticated senior programmers.

Meanwhile the other 99.997% of WordPress site owners *aren’t* senior programmers.

For all the fussing about rogue plugins and “bloated” themes, virtually all WordPress sites run fine. Under genuinely atrocious owner and server conditions! Because, in spite of the additional UI/UX barriers Gutenberg introduces, or the additional “bloat” Elementor introduces, you don’t have to know VStudio, or vim, or Markdown to add a blog post or update your product catalog. People will put up with a lot if it means they can own their own stuff.

We’ll see if EmDash takes off. And if it’s actually easier for end users to own and operate? Awesome, I’ll jump on board. But I haven’t really seen anything that suggests they’re thinking about end users.

Grumble, grumble, gripe, gripe.