One month, three production sites in Japanese — including paid client work. Here is what we had to build ourselves.

[Gohan-mada]

We started building on EmDash at the end of August, on 0.34.0. Five weeks later three sites are live, all in Japanese:

• https://cabu-labo.co.jp — about 60 pages, migrated off WordPress. D1 + R2 on Workers.
• https://tomoru-ai.jp — our own company site.
• https://q-lu.co — a client site (a medical wig salon in Matsumoto, Japan), also migrated off WordPress.

Most posts in this category are plugins, so I want to add the other side: what a small shop runs into when EmDash has to earn money.

What EmDash handled well

Content modelling, the admin, Portable Text and the MCP server are genuinely good. We edit in the admin for ordinary changes and drive bulk changes through the API, which is what made three sites in five weeks possible at all.

Migration from WordPress worked, with one trap worth passing on: the WXR export references attachments by id, while EmDash resolves them by _ref. Our own import check stayed green and we shipped one site with 57 body images silently missing before we caught it. Check the rendered pages, not just the import report.

What we had to build on top

These are Astro-layer implementations, not packaged plugins. I am posting them as a description of the gap, not as a release:

• Members-only file delivery. Email magic-link sign-in, a signed cookie, and downloads served from a private R2 bucket. emdash-better-auth covers sign-in; what was missing for us was the gated delivery at the other end.
• Event booking. A month calendar, per-event pages, capacity and cut-off, a confirmation mail carrying the Zoom link, cancellation, an attendee list for admins, and reminders at 24h and 1h via Cron Triggers. The existing ICS plugin exports calendars; it does not take bookings.
• Page cache plus a purge endpoint. TTFB went from 2.7s to 0.5s. The catch: anything that writes to D1 directly bypasses the purge path, so we had to route those writes through an endpoint of our own.
• Sitemap entries for pages that do not live in D1. EmDash builds the sitemap from D1 only.

One number

Cloudflare Image Transformations took our heaviest page from 2,005KB to 597KB, and full load from 4.1s to 2.0s. The cause was format, not dimensions — a 480x250 photo saved as PNG was 297KB on its own. (Related to the PageSpeed post from May, which is worth reading.)

On Windows

We develop on Windows 11, which seems rare here. 0.37.0 could not build at all on Windows (#2978); it is fixed in 0.38.0. If you are on Windows and stuck, upgrade emdash itself, not just @emdash-cms/registry-verification.

Happy to answer questions about any of this, and happy to be told we built something that already exists.

[minemeraj]

This is so cool! I really would love to know more what are the missing features that we can add in emdash-better-auth plugin. better-auth has so many plugins I am planning to add some more. Please feel free to open issue here: https://github.com/theweekendprojects/emdash-better-auth/issues

Nice work!