AI Across The WP Ecosystem

I recently wrote that one of the most rewarding pieces of working in my role as head of AI at Automattic and the core AI co-lead at WordPress is seeing the foundational components of AI that we architected and then built into WordPress actually being used.

Some of the most rewarding pieces of working in my role is seeing the community use, extend and contribute to the Core AI work for @WordPress

A @MistralAI adapter: https://t.co/1LT8I65FEs

ACF supporting Abilities: https://t.co/i66XO2qzTi

Almost 1k stars on WP MCP:…

— James LePage (@jameswlepage) April 7, 2026

We designed the building blocks to the best of our abilities, but the only way they would really work is if the community adopted them, contributed to them, and extended them in ways we didn’t anticipate. That’s exactly what’s happening. As I prepare for my WordCamp Asia opening keynote later today, I wanted to catalog the community projects building on the WordPress AI infrastructure. People registering abilities. People building MCP servers. People writing provider plugins. People shipping tutorials. People contributing abilities live in a Slack channel.

This is not exhaustive. It’s a snapshot. And honestly, even compiling this list I kept finding more. The volume is the point, I don’t expect you to read this one word for word 🙂

Quick Context: The Building Blocks

Everything below depends on four interconnected pieces the WordPress AI team built: the Abilities API (WordPress 6.9, with client-side JS in 7.0), the PHP AI Client SDK + WP AI Client (WordPress 7.0 core), the MCP Adapter (823 stars, 107 forks), and the AI Plugin with the new Connectors API. The PHP AI Client is notably platform-agnostic, developed collaboratively with the broader PHP community, not just WordPress. WordPress 7.0 ships with official provider plugins for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini.

But the interesting part isn’t what we built. It’s what everyone else is building on top of it.

Community AI Providers

The provider architecture is intentionally open. Anyone can build a provider plugin for any AI service. The WordPress AI team published a Call for Testing for community connector plugins in March. The community has shipped beyond the official three:

• Mistral AI provider by Lauri Saarni — text, vision, function calling, image generation
• Grok (xAI) provider by Aslam Doctor — also a WordCamp Asia Contributor Day table lead today
• OpenRouter provider by Jonathan Bossenger — 400+ models through a single connection
• Ollama provider by Fueled — local open-source models, zero data leaving your server
• mittwald AI provider — German hosting company connecting their AI infrastructure directly
• Azure AI Foundry provider by Per Soderlind — Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, and Cognitive Services
• Hugging Face provider by Aslam Doctor — text and images, multiple HF inference backends
• AI Provider for Open WebUI — OpenAI-compatible settings with model discovery
• AI Provider for Alibaba Cloud — DashScope/Qwen connector with function-calling support
• DuetG AI Connector — explicitly supports DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, SiliconFlow, LM Studio, and Ollama

Write your code against wp_ai_client_prompt() and it works with any of them. Write it once. Run it on any model, anywhere.

Plugins Adopting the Abilities API

WooCommerce (7M installs). WPForms Lite (6M installs). WPCode / Insert Headers and Footers (3M installs, dedicated abilities class). Jetpack (3M installs). ACF 6.8 (2M installs). Joinchat (700K installs). Ninja Forms (600K installs). SureForms (500K installs). Cart Abandonment Recovery by Brainstorm Force (300K installs). CartFlows (200K installs). LatePoint booking (100K installs). OttoKit automation (100K installs). Greenshift page builder (70K installs). hCaptcha for WP (70K installs). Secure Custom Fields (60K installs — the community ACF fork, which shipped Post Type abilities in 6.6.0, Taxonomy abilities in 6.7.0, and Field abilities in 6.8.0). MainWP Dashboard (20K installs — the agency multi-site management platform). Better Messages (10K installs). miniOrange SAML SSO (10K installs). WS Form (10K installs). WindPress Tailwind CSS (3K installs, 43 matches). There’s still so much more, as well.

The notable ones:

• ACF 6.8 — Full Abilities API integration. AI tools can discover, inspect, create, and modify field groups, CPTs, taxonomies, and content. In their demo, Claude Code connected to an empty site and generated a complete real estate content model from a natural language description. Also shipped automatic Schema.org structured data generation (867 types, 1,509 properties).
• Ninja Forms 3.14.0 — 32 abilities across 7 capability areas. Full AI form builder. They call it “Dashboard Parity”: the AI performs exactly the same operations you would manually. 100% free. Full docs.
• WS Form — One of the first plugins aligned with all three building blocks: Abilities API, MCP Server, and WP AI Client SDK. Built-in MCP server. “Create from AI” template. Also published one of the best MCP tutorials available.
• WooCommerce — Registers abilities under the woocommerce/ namespace, exposes them via the MCP Adapter. Developer preview gives AI assistants structured access to products, orders, and customers. Published a demo plugin showing third-party developers how to register custom WooCommerce abilities. Exploring agentic commerce with Stripe’s ACP and Shopify/Google’s UCP. April Office Hours focused on AI and MCP in Woo workflows.
• miniOrange — Adopted the Abilities API across SAML SSO, OAuth, LDAP, and 2FA plugins. AI tools can diagnose SSO errors through registered abilities. Also shipping a separate miniOrange AI Agent plugin.
• Jetpack — Bundles abilities. Jetpack Forms registers abilities via the API being in core. The WordPress.com AI Assistant uses abilities to power its editor and Media Library features.
• MainWP Dashboard (20K installs) — The self-hosted WordPress management platform for agencies went deep. Abilities are woven throughout the codebase, not bolted on. Agencies running dozens of client sites through MainWP can now expose all of that management surface to AI agents.
• VigIA — 9 Abilities API actions around analytics, robots, and blocking so agents can inspect and control site visibility. 800+ installs, 12 five-star reviews.
• DiveWP — 11 performance-diagnostic abilities for technical audits and remediation.
• All Sources Images — Image search, featured-image, and generation abilities explicitly marketed as Abilities API + MCP compatible.
• Virtual Media Folders — Exposes folder-management abilities like vmfo/list-folders, vmfo/create-folder, and vmfo/add-to-folder for agentic media organization.
• WP Password Policy — v3.6.0 implemented the Abilities API so password-policy controls are available in the WordPress MCP server.
• Fluid Design System for Elementor — v2.3.0 added AI-agent integration via Abilities API and MCP, registers a fluid-design-system MCP server with the MCP Adapter.
• Rapls AI Chatbot — 7 MCP tools plus a “WordPress Abilities API Bridge” that auto-registers those tools as abilities for discovery by MCP adapters. Explicitly bilingual English/Japanese.

The long tail: CartFlows, LatePoint booking, OttoKit automation, hCaptcha, WindPress Tailwind integration, Enable Abilities for MCP (32 abilities, WooCommerce-aware, explicit MCP bridge), Ultimate Multisite (AI access to SaaS and WaaS networks), and more.

Among the major-plugin suspects: LearnDash 5.0 provides an MCP-ready foundation via its stabilized REST API and OpenAPI spec. BuddyPress has an external MCP server plus an abilities MU-plugin. Toolset currently appears through an external MCP add-on. All showing adoption in the direction of the standard.

Community MCP Servers and Plugins

People are building MCP servers for WordPress at a pace I genuinely did not expect.

• GravityMCP by GravityKit — MCP for Gravity Forms. Claude generated a 44-field grant application form from one prompt. Open source.
• WordPress Playground MCP — One npx command. Agents read files, execute PHP, install plugins, manage sites in the browser via WebAssembly. No server, no Docker.
• AI Engine (Meow Apps, 80k+ installs) — MCP tools crafted for AI agents. WooCommerce MCP module with 25 tools. Polylang integration. Any site running it becomes an MCP server. Also connects outward to external MCP servers.
• WordPress.org Plugin Directory MCP Server — Official. Built on Abilities API + MCP Adapter. AI assistants can validate readmes, check submission status, and submit plugins. Full docs.
• Novamira — A different philosophy entirely. Five raw primitives: Execute PHP, Read/Write Files, Edit Files, Delete/Toggle, List Directory. The AI gets a sandboxed PHP execution environment inside WordPress itself. No abilities to register, no schemas to write. Free and open source, built by Ovation S.r.l. in Italy, for WordPress 6.9+. It’s the philosophical opposite of the Abilities API pattern, and it’s interesting for that reason.
• Respira — Full-featured MCP client for self-hosted WordPress with multi-site support and Abilities API integration. 940 weekly npm downloads. v5.5.0.
• WebMCP Abilities — From the WP Popup Maker team. Bridges wp_register_ability() registrations to Chrome’s navigator.modelContext browser API. Register once and both the MCP Adapter (CLI/API agents) and WebMCP Abilities (browser agents) pick it up automatically. Running in production at wppopupmaker.com. There’s also a core experiment: PR #224 in the WordPress/ai repo adds a WebMCP Adapter experiment for wp-admin.

Then there’s the long tail on WordPress.org: AI Agent Hub (80+ abilities, 10 modules, MCP server, workflow builder), StifLi Flex MCP (117+ tools, auto-discovers abilities from other plugins), Abilities Bridge (MCP server + admin chat, 7-gate permissions), Royal MCP (security-focused, auto-detects WooCommerce), MountDev AI MCP Connector (75+ tools, OAuth 2.0 for ChatGPT), WebMCP Bridge, MCP Tracker, AI-Ready WP, Albert — The AI Butler (25+ abilities including WooCommerce actions), MCP Content Manager Lite (auto-discovers CPTs, taxonomies, and custom fields from WooCommerce, ACF, Toolset, and Pods), and WebSamurai (adds its own MCP endpoint at /wp-json/websamurai/v1/mcp).

On GitHub: wordpress-wae (84 abilities), Claudeus WP MCP (145 tools), mcp-wordpress (DXT extension for Claude Desktop), jpollock/wordpress-mcp, the mcp-wp GitHub org, @automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote, prathammanocha/wordpress-mcp-server (48 stars / 15 forks), stefans71/wordpress-mcp-server (JSON-RPC 2.0 MCP server for CRUD operations via the REST API), rnaga/wp-mcp (CRUD primitives for posts, users, comments, terms, metadata, options, and site settings; also on npm as @rnaga/wp-mcp), aplaceforallmystuff/mcp-wp-abilities (dynamically discovers WordPress 6.9+ abilities and exposes them as MCP tools), bjornfix/mcp-expose-abilities (documents 61+ core abilities and 280+ ecosystem abilities across Elementor, Rank Math, Wordfence, Brevo, Cloudflare, and Google Workspace), vapvarun/buddypress-mcp (BuddyPress MCP server bundled with a BuddyPress abilities MU-plugin), and bvisible/elementor-mcp-api (REST + MCP controls for AI-driven Elementor editing, auto-registers 20 abilities with MCP Adapter).

On npm: @instawp/mcp-wp, wordpress-org-mcp-server, @node2flow/wordpress-mcp, @iflow-mcp/wordpress-mcp, @verygoodplugins/mcp-local-wp, @cavort-it-systems/wordpress-mcp, @kokorolx/wordpress-mcp-kit, and community-built servers from Japan to Russia to Thailand.

On hosting: Pressable is pre-installing the MCP Adapter. Kinsta published a guide on building against their hosting API. WordPress.com has a dedicated MCP settings panel with per-tool toggles and is in the official Claude Connectors Directory. WP Engine’s AI Toolkit includes a Smart Search AI MCP Server. Pantheon’s Content Publisher promises an MCP server for AI assistants plus native WordPress plugin integration. InstaWP says every InstaWP site includes a built-in WordPress MCP server. WordPress VIP now frames the platform as AI/agent ready through open APIs and standards like MCP.

The AI Plugin

The WordPress/ai repo (169 stars, 72 forks, 30 open PRs, 64 open issues) is the canonical plugin for AI features in WordPress. Recently renamed from “AI Experiments” to just “AI” and now requires WordPress 7.0. It serves as both a user tool and a reference implementation.

Shipped experiments include title generation, content summarization, excerpt generation, alt text generation, featured image generation, image editing (prompt-based refining and background removal/item replacement), and review notes generation. Being tested: type-ahead suggestions and comment moderation. The Abilities Explorer built into the plugin lets you browse and test every registered ability on your site. v0.7.0 shipped April 7, two days before 7.0.

Community tooling built around the AI Client: wp-ai-content-kit (content operations like alt text and excerpts), wp-ai-client-demo, ai-valve (meters and gates AI Client prompt calls as middleware), Grumpy AI Gate (records and inspects AI Client requests for debugging and governance), emdashcodes/wp-ability-toolkit (toolkit for developing and testing abilities and AI integrations), and jonathanbossenger/wp-abilities-test (small test and demo plugin for PHP and JS abilities).

On WP-CLI: wp-cli/ability-command is the official WP-CLI package for listing, inspecting, and executing registered abilities from the command line. wp-cli/ai-command (25 stars) adds CLI control of WordPress with WP-CLI, AI, and MCP together.

Agent Skills

This one is a fundamentally different kind of contribution. WordPress/agent-skills (1.2k stars, 160 forks) is a collection of portable instruction bundles that teach AI coding assistants how to do WordPress development properly. Not plugins. Not providers. Knowledge, packaged for machines.

14 skills today: wordpress-router, wp-project-triage, wp-block-development, wp-block-themes, wp-plugin-development, wp-rest-api, wp-interactivity-api, wp-abilities-api, wp-wpcli-and-ops, wp-performance, wp-phpstan, wp-playground, blueprint, and wpds. Works with Claude Code, Codex, VS Code/Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity. Install with npx skills add. Contributing is Markdown, not code. “You don’t need to be a coding wizard.”

The repo originated at Automattic, then moved to the official WordPress GitHub org. Brandon Payton’s wp-playground skill was announced on WordPress.org News. WordPress skills are featured in VoltAgent’s awesome-agent-skills alongside skills from Anthropic, Google, Vercel, Stripe, and Cloudflare. Community members are also building their own: nathanonn/claude-skills-wp-abilities-api is a Claude skill package covering WordPress Abilities API docs and conventions.

Agentic Web Infrastructure

Some of the most interesting work isn’t about individual AI features. It’s about making WordPress sites legible and actionable to AI systems at a protocol level.

• Yoast SEO Schema Aggregation + NLWeb — Collaboration with Microsoft and Schema.org co-creator R.V. Guha. Consolidates a site’s entire structured data graph into a single “schemamap” endpoint. Every NLWeb instance is also an MCP server. Opt-in in Yoast SEO 27.1.
• llms.txt — Yoast, Rank Math, and SEOPress all support llms.txt generation. Rank Math added an AI search traffic tracker. Dedicated plugins on the directory too (Website LLMs.txt, LLMs-Full.txt Generator). The SEO community is independently deciding WordPress sites need to be readable by AI.

Agency and Enterprise Adoption

Human Made’s WordPress in 2026 report calls the Abilities API and MCP “an agentic ecosystem foundation” and the most important architectural shift in the cycle. Their public essays describe WordPress as an “agentic platform” and frame MCP as the layer that grounds conversations and actions in real site data plus user-granted capabilities. Multidots published an enterprise guide on deploying Abilities API and MCP for content teams. Trew Knowledge wrote a plain-English guide for builders and product teams. WebDevStudios is already helping brands architect around native WordPress AI capabilities. rtCamp published “What the Abilities API means for WordPress composability.” WordPress VIP’s enterprise messaging explicitly names the Abilities API, MCP Adapter, and PHP Client AI API as foundational systems, and their innovation showcase tied open standards like MCP to agency-led AI workflows (XWP / Syde). Jeff Paul at Fueled / 10up is on the WordPress AI Team and embedded in both sides.

Community Tutorials and Education

People aren’t just building. They’re teaching others how to build. WS Form’s MCP server tutorial, Weston Ruter on adding MCP to the core dev environment (posted yesterday), Summix on custom abilities in 7.0, ByteIota on building your first connector plugin, WPRobo on custom WooCommerce abilities, ALM Corp’s complete guide, WebDevStudios on MCP as a dev tool, AttoWP on the full AI stack, Jonathan Bossenger’s foundational explainer, Fluent Forms’ plain-language guide, WPPoland’s deep dive, Nowshad Jawad’s MCP Bridge tutorial on Medium, Abhinav Dobhal on Agent Skills, and an entire awesome list of AI in WordPress on GitHub.

On WordPress.tv: Developer Hours: WordPress 6.9 Abilities API (official session with live demos), Jonathan Bossenger’s WordCamp US 2025 MCP + Abilities API workshop, and WordPress MCP + Abilities API: Habla con tu Web — a dedicated Spanish-language WordCamp talk on the full stack.

Podcasts and newsletters: WP Podcast’s “AI Guide for WordPress” covering the WP AI Client merge and MCP Adapter, WP Product Talk on “How WordPress Plugins can Leverage Core AI Technology” (Abilities API + MCP + WooCommerce), and WP Builds episodes #342, #355, and #357.

Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2025 keynote called the Abilities API and MCP Adapter the most important architectural developments of the year. The talks are multiplying!

The global community is fully in. Japanese: lilting.ch on ACF 6.8 and the MCP Adapter; Qiita tutorials on WordPress.com MCP; a developer built an npm MCP server for a local women’s soccer club’s WordPress site. German: WPCare24 covers the Abilities API, MCP Adapter, and PHP AI Client SDK in their 6.9 update explainer. Spanish: Johnny Zuri on the PHP SDK, Abilities API, and MCP Adapter roles; WP Podcast Spain calls the MCP Adapter a key bridge. Portuguese: Felipe Belloni’s State of the Word recap highlights Abilities API and MCP Adapter. Russian: a community MCP server shipped for mayai.ru. The ecosystem doesn’t have a language boundary.

WordCamp Asia Contributor Day

This is happening right now. The #core-ai table at Contributor Day has been one of the most active. Dozens of new contributors joined the #core-ai Slack channel today. People are writing and sharing abilities in real time. Himanshu K. Ujla shared a plugins/list ability snippet during the session. Aslam Doctor created a test plugin so new contributors could go from zero to connected MCP in minutes. Aditya Singh filed a Trac ticket for a core/get-user ability. Ovidiu Galatan dropped the MCP Adapter 0.5.0 pre-release into the channel for live testing before official release. Table leads Aslam Doctor, Gajendra Singh, and raftaar1191 ran things in person while justlevine coordinated digitally.

The Trac AI component currently shows 23 open tickets. Active proposals include: #64098 (the foundational Abilities API proposal), #64591 (add WP AI Client and the Connectors screen), #64872 (add AI REST API endpoints at wp-ai/v1), #64605 (core get-settings ability), #64616 (core update-settings ability), #64657 (core get-user ability, filed today), #64606 (get post/pages abilities), #64990 (filtering for wp_get_abilities()), #64989 (execution lifecycle filters), #64955 (schema compiler for AI tool-calling), and #64865 (agentic loop support for auto-resolving abilities).

The team has weekly Contributor Calls on Google Meet, biweekly Office Hours in #core-ai on Thursdays at 5pm UTC, and curated good first issues across the repos. Contributing guides for every project: AI Plugin, MCP Adapter, Agent Skills, PHP AI Client.

WordPress.com

On the hosted side, we’ve been shipping product on top of the same infrastructure: built-in MCP server on all paid plans, the WordPress.com Claude Connector, the AI Assistant (uses abilities to power editor and Media Library features), OAuth 2.1 for AI agents, the Claude Cowork Plugin and Agent Skills, and the Content Guidelines experiment. I wrote about the full timeline here.

By The Numbers

Across the WordPress GitHub org, the AI-related repos alone account for over 2,300 stars: agent-skills (1.2k), mcp-adapter (823), ai (169), wp-ai-client (96). Ten community provider plugins. ~70+ plugins with wp_register_ability committed, collectively covering hundreds of millions of active installs. 72 plugins on WordPress.org return for an “mcp” search. The official provider plugins (released _really recently_) are already accumulating installs: Anthropic at 600+, Google at 300+, OpenAI at 200+. Fifteen or more MCP server implementations. Fourteen agent skills. Dozens of tutorials. 23 open Trac tickets. And the WordPress.org Plugin Directory itself runs an MCP server built on the Abilities API.

The Point

WordPress 7.0 is imminent. It’s the first version of WordPress with a native AI client in core. But the infrastructure is only valuable if people build on it.

Look at what’s above. Independent developers writing provider plugins for Mistral, Grok, OpenRouter, Azure, Hugging Face, Ollama, Alibaba Cloud, and DeepSeek-compatible endpoints. WPForms, WPCode, ACF, Ninja Forms, and WS Form building on the Abilities API. WooCommerce and MainWP going deep. GravityKit building a full MCP server. The Playground team bridging agents to the browser. Yoast collaborating with Microsoft to make sites legible to AI. An Italian company building a raw PHP execution MCP. A German hosting company writing its own provider plugin. WP Engine, Pantheon, InstaWP, and WordPress VIP all framing MCP as part of their platform. The WordPress.org Plugin Directory itself running on the Abilities API and MCP Adapter. The co-Team Rep at Vercel building his own AI services plugin on the same infrastructure. 23 open Trac tickets proposing new core abilities. Tutorial authors in Japan, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Poland. An awesome list of AI in WordPress. 1,200 stars on a repo of Markdown files that teach AI how to do WordPress correctly. And today at WordCamp Asia, people writing and sharing abilities live in a Slack channel.

None of this was dictated from the top. We built the building blocks. The community decided they were worth using.

If you work in the WordPress ecosystem and have been watching from the sidelines, this is the moment to jump in. Register an ability. Build a workflow. Point an agent at your site’s MCP endpoint. Write a tutorial. Contribute a skill. The building blocks are there. The community is already using them. Join in.

Did I miss a project? Let me know and I’ll add it.