Roger Stringer
This site has had a few changes over the past week:
On the surface that's a stack swap. Underneath, it's about how I build things now.
This site has been around since 2003. In that time it's run on a custom setup, WordPress, Ghost, static, back to WordPress, back to Ghost, back to static, and most recently a custom Directus / Drizzle / Astro build.
Looking back at that list, every move lined up with how I was building at the time. WordPress was the obvious choice when everything was PHP on shared hosting. Ghost was where I went when I wanted something leaner and focused on writing. Static happened when build pipelines got good enough that a database felt like overhead. Directus made sense when I wanted a proper API-first backend I could shape myself.
This move follows the same pattern. These days a lot of my building happens alongside an AI agent, so I want a CMS that an agent can actually work with, not one I have to click through on its behalf.
The Directus setup worked great, and I'd still recommend Directus. But EmDash has hit 1.0.1, and I've been using it more and more on other projects like Get Butters, so it made sense to bring my own site along.
What keeps pulling me back to EmDash is that it treats an agent as a real user of the system, not an afterthought. A lot of CMSes are adding AI features right now: a writing assistant in the editor, a generate button here and there. EmDash goes the other way. It ships with an MCP server, typed content collections an agent can inspect, a CLI that speaks JSON, and docs written so a model can follow them.
The migration was my proof. Both Directus and EmDash have solid MCP support, so I connected an agent to both sides and had it recreate my content types in EmDash to mirror what I had in Directus, then move the content across. That's not a job I'd have looked forward to doing by hand.
A few other things I like:
The biggest change was going from Markdown to Portable Text.
For years my content was Markdown strings. Portable Text stores content as structured JSON instead: paragraphs, lists, links and custom blocks are all data rather than markup. That means an agent can edit one paragraph or add a list item without parsing HTML and hoping it doesn't break the formatting. It's also why an agent editing this site feels reliable instead of risky.
It did take some adjustment. Content that was just text in a file is now a structure, and that changes how you think about writing and rendering it. For me it's worth it.
I'm enthusiastic, but I'm not going to pretend it's finished:
None of that stopped me. For a personal site and the client work I do, the tradeoffs are fine, and I'd rather be early on the right idea.
Joost de Valk wrote a great piece when EmDash launched, EmDash: a CMS built for 2026. He goes deeper into the architecture and the plugin security model, and he ends up in a very similar place to me: the question worth asking now is what a CMS should look like when AI agents are doing a lot of the building. It's worth a read.
If you're thinking about moving to EmDash yourself, or want help with a migration, get in touch.
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