We build and deploy EmDash CMS sites.

We work out the collections and fields with your editors and generate the TypeScript types the templates use. Each person gets one of EmDash's five roles, and changes to the model stay with the Admin role. The model goes into a seed file, so staging and production start from the same structure.

We build the Astro templates against live content and wire preview into them, so an editor sees a draft on the real page before publishing it. In our 0.42.0, 1.0.1 and 1.2.0 checks, EmDash and its Starter template served previews without a noindex directive, so we add one. From 1.2.0 a preview link also shows the draft on list pages. We set how long a preview link lasts to match how your team shares drafts.

In the 1.0.1 run, a new meta description on a published post reached the public page on save, without Publish changes. If your team reviews SEO changes before release, we test that step with your editors.

On Cloudflare we map Cloudflare Access to your identity provider's groups, and it becomes the only way into the admin. Other sites use passkeys, which EmDash sets up by default, or GitHub, Google or Microsoft Entra ID sign-in. Entra ID arrived in EmDash 1.1.0.

A passkey works only at the address where it was created. When a site moves from a staging domain to its own, a signed-in administrator can use EmDash's 1.2.0 handover link to continue at the new address and add a passkey. The separate Email users action can notify the other users, who then sign in by email and add a passkey.

Invitations and account recovery go out by email, so we connect an email provider before launch. Without one, a sole admin who loses access has to reset it through the database.

We deploy to your Cloudflare account or your own Node server. Scheduled publishing needs a Cron Trigger on Workers and a process that stays up on Node, and we set up whichever one applies.

EmDash does not restore its own JSON backups. Our backup routine copies the raw database, the media and the encryption keys, and before launch we restore them into a fresh environment and check the public site.

In the 1.0.1 run, on Node and SQLite, that restore brought back content, media, revision history and the admin account. The Starter template still leaves SQLite's -wal and -shm files out of .gitignore, and they can hold content and email addresses, so we add them before the first commit.

We run EmDash's importer for posts, pages and media while the WordPress site is still reachable at its public address, which the media step needs. Then we request every old URL on the new site. In our 1.0.1 test, and again on 1.2.0, the importer created no redirects and left internal links on the old addresses, so we add the redirects and rewrite the links.

Content lands in the default locale, and visibility rules drop. Scheduled dates dropped before 1.2.0; on 1.2.0 a future-dated post kept its schedule. In both tests a nested category lost its parent. From 1.2.0 a Classic-editor table with only text in its cells arrives as a table, and one with merged cells still arrives as plain text. We restore what is lost and relink the translations WPML or Polylang had grouped.

Memberships, forms, advertising and anything else a WordPress plugin handled get rebuilt as an EmDash plugin or moved to a separate service. The old site stays up until each one works on the new site.