The CMSs I use now in AI era
I managed WordPress and Drupal sites from 2013. These are the three I start with now.
In 2013 the job was WordPress and Drupal. A client needed a site, and those two were how you got one without writing the whole thing yourself.
A theme, a plugin for the form, a login for whoever had to change a sentence later. That ease is why they were the ones everyone used.
I still think they are good at that job. Plenty of sites should stay on them. Putting a site together got easier in other tools, and those tools let an agent edit the entry with me. That is where I start now.
Bye Bye WordPress & Drupal
WordPress was the first CMS in which I made my first website. May be you to have same story to share :D
WordPress story is very much interesting and as of till now 2026 the world 40% site is still running over it as per the BuiltWith reports.
My job was hectic were pages and a blog could be up before lunch, and the afternoon often went to finding which plugin had broken another.
Drupal was the one I opened when the content was odd and the permissions had to be exact. I learned both by fixing them: a white screen after an update, a view that came back empty, a module that needed a patch nobody had written.
I did that work for years. What I want now is the content model next to the code, and an assistant that is already looking at the entry.
EmDash
Cloudflare built EmDash. On 1 April 2026 they announced it as a CMS written in TypeScript, running on Astro, and called it a spiritual successor to WordPress.
In January that year they bought The Astro Technology Company. In June they bought VoidZero, the company behind Vite. EmDash was written at Cloudflare.
EmDash 1.0 came out on 28 September 2026. It is free and open source. They had already moved the Cloudflare Blog onto it in August, before the 1.0 release, and the blog stayed up through a launch week.
Plugins run in a sandbox, and you install them from a registry inside the admin. The admin is part of the site.
What I can do there, an agent can do through the API, the CLI, or the built-in MCP server.
They also released an alpha of EmDash Build, which takes a brief and leaves an EmDash site: server-rendered pages, a database, media, and the admin.
I have made two sites on it. This blog is one. I build it in Cursor. The agent drafts and publishes through the same admin I open.
Payload
James Mikrut and the team released a public beta of Payload in January 2021. It is open source. The content model is a config file in the project, and editors get an admin for the entries.
On 17 June 2025 the team joined Figma. Payload is still open source, and you can still run it on your own server. The reason Mikrut gave is the gap between a Figma file and the site someone has to keep updated.
A designer draws it, a developer rebuilds it, and then the words live in a third place. They want that distance shorter.
I have built five sites on Payload. I use it when the site is an application and the config should sit in the repo with the rest of the code.
Version 4.0 is in progress on their main branch. The admin is being redrawn so it shares a look with Figma.
They are adding hierarchies, a better asset library, a simpler MCP setup, skills an agent can load, and a TanStack adapter so the same config can sit on another framework. They want a 4.0 beta, and they want that beta shorter than 3.0 was.
Directus
Directus is made by Monospace. They call the admin a Data Studio. You connect a SQL database you already have, and you get REST and GraphQL, accounts, permissions down to a field, files, Flows, dashboards, live updates, and a visual editor. Their overview is the short list of those pieces.
I have used it on four projects. They were applications. The data was the product, and the site was a view of it. The Studio was where the records, the files, and the permissions lived.
The AI Assistant in the Studio became generally available in 11.15. You can attach the item you are editing.
It works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or another compatible provider, and it sits in the visual editor so you can ask for a change while you look at the page. 11.16 added images and PDFs.
A native MCP server is included, and an agent is held to the same permissions as a person on the team. In the July 2026 changelog, 12.2 replaced the rich text editor with Tiptap.
On their roadmap they have described the assistant taking actions inside the Studio, translating a field in place, talking to a model you host yourself, and early experiments with agents that run in the background.
How I choose
A content site, with an agent in the repo, is EmDash. An application I am writing in code is Payload. When the product is the database and the website is one way into it, I open Directus.