So it’s been a few weeks since we launched EmDash on Unlimited Hosting, and you good people have been doing exactly what we hoped: spinning up sites, kicking the tires, and (very politely) letting us know when things went sideways.<\/p>\n
When we shipped this, I openly said it was going to be a bit Wild West. EmDash is bleeding edge, Cloudflare are pushing new releases at a pretty serious clip, and we wanted to get you hands-on quickly, rough edges and all.<\/p>\n
So, in true WPMU DEV style, we’ve been sanding those edges down. Here’s a quick run-through of what we’ve already fixed.<\/p>\n
Yeah, this one was a doozy.<\/p>\n
In the default EmDash template, creating a new page or project, publishing it, then visiting the URL would land you on a glorious 404. Not exactly the thrilling first impression we were going for.<\/p>\n
Why does this happen? Unlike WordPress, EmDash templates handle their own routing (it’s built on Astro under the hood). The official template wasn’t accounting for newly created content, so pages and projects existed in the editor but had no public route to live on.<\/p>\n
We’ve patched the official template on our end so new pages and projects show up the moment you hit publish.<\/p>\n
EmDash handles email differently to WordPress, so we wanted to make sure all the usual transactional bits (passkey login links, user invites, that kind of thing) just work the moment your site spins up.<\/p>\n
We’ve built a small plugin that pre-configures email on every new EmDash site on Unlimited Hosting. It sends everything through noreply@yourwpsite.email<\/em>, exactly like our WordPress hosting does. So, if email works on your WP sites, it works here too. Bundled by default, nothing for you to set up.<\/p>\n A bit of routine hardening, but worth doing.<\/p>\n EmDash ships with a \/_emdash\/api\/setup\/dev-bypass<\/em><\/strong> endpoint that’s handy during local development. Unfortunately, it\u2019s a delicious target for opportunistic bots once a site is in production. We’ve blocked it at the server level on Unlimited Hosting. You’d never notice it was gone unless you went looking for it. Bots, however, are going to have a less interesting time.<\/p>\n A nice little performance win, too.<\/p>\n Media files on your EmDash sites are now served directly by nginx straight from your uploads, instead of routing through Node for every request. Fewer hops, faster images, less load on your site’s runtime. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just quicker now.<\/p>\n We’re making the Hub even more responsive and improving the UI\/UX behind the scenes. For example, actions like Reset and Rebuild are getting clearer, real-time progress feedback so you’ll see exactly where things are at and know the moment a job’s done. Small touches like these make the whole experience feel that bit slicker.<\/p>\n3. Tightened up security<\/h2>\n
4. Snappier media delivery<\/h2>\n
5. Hub polish<\/h2>\n