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Home » News » WordPress Releases an Official Plugin for AI Tools
WordPress introduced a new plugin in a canonical MCP Adapter that enables developers to connect AI systems with WordPress sites through one simple plugin. Search Engine Journal announced the news on October 7, 2026.
The plugin was not new. What changed is where it lives. It is now in the official WordPress.org plugin directory, so anyone can install it from their dashboard.
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Search Engine Journal describes it as an open standard created by Anthropic, which provides secure connection of AI systems to applications, data, plugins, tools and websites, allowing them to read information and perform certain actions.
The WordPress.org page explains this protocol quite simply – in case of its absence, each AI client would have to have a unique integration. With MCP, the system only needs to list the capabilities in the form of tools, resources and prompts, which would be available to any MCP client.
In the context of a WordPress site, this means that AI can interact with WordPress, its plugins and capabilities – including small ones, such as publishing a post, or large ones, such as design elements.
The adapter was already available on its GitHub releases page, which contributed to more than 40,000 active installations. Version 0.7.0 is the first version to be published in the official WordPress.org repository, according to the plugin page. Search Engine Journal reports the version as 0.70, while WordPress.org lists 0.7.0.
Jason Adams, Director of Engineering, AI at Automattic, announced the release on X and described it as the canonical MCP plugin for WordPress, noting that it was carefully crafted for backward compatibility with MCP versions. He added that it utilized the Abilities API to avoid duplicated functions while handling authorization.
One of the commenters on X (formerly Twitter) mentioned that WordPress plugins have a long lifespan. This is true, and it raises the topic of compatibility.
Adams agreed, explaining that the team cannot control the backward compatibility of the MCP protocol itself, so they needed to create a pathway within the WordPress ecosystem.
In other words, the MCP is a constantly evolving standard, and the plugin serves as a buffer for those who cannot update their software at the same pace.
The WordPress.org page for the plugin makes it clear that this is not an AI-inference plugin itself. MCP Adapter is the server and transport layer; it provides no AI capabilities of its own.
What it does is expose abilities – individual capabilities, registered by the core or another plugin, such as reading posts or updating a setting. The adapter takes the set of available abilities on a given site, makes them accessible to MCP clients, and handles the protocol-level negotiation, permissions, and error-checking.
This leads to the next point: that a site will need to have these abilities exposed for the plugin to function as intended. They can come from the core or from another plugin (or a theme, though that’s less common) that makes them available.
The plugin is part of the AI Building Blocks for WordPress initiative.
The plugin page lists several features:
The adapter registers MCP endpoints over its built-in HTTP transport. An MCP-compatible client connects to the endpoint and signs in as a WordPress user. The plugin supports two exact MCP revisions, 2025-11-25 and 2026-07-28.
Giving the AI access to a website raises some obvious questions. The plugin’s page answers a few of them.
Access is always opt-in. Just having a registered ability isn’t enough to let anyone use it, not even by accident. You have to explicitly mark the ability as public for it to be available over the MCP. However, permission checks still happen, and they always happen against the currently logged-in user, so it’s not possible for anyone to call your methods without having passed the tests you’ve written.
A sensible approach to this would be to make sure you’re only exposing what the AI agents really need, and to use restricted accounts wherever possible. That’s a suggestion coming from me, not from the plugin page.
Security issues should be reported through the process described in the project’s SECURITY.md file, and not publicly.
The plugin requires WordPress 6.9 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher. It has been tested up to WordPress 7.1.3.
To install simply go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin. Search for MCP Adapter and click Install Now. Then activate the plugin and register the abilities you want to expose, or install a plugin that will do that for you.
If you’re a developer that prefers the command line you can run a WP-CLI command to install and activate the plugin. Developers that make plugins that require the adapter can add a Requires Plugins header to their plugin.
Version 0.7.0 of the adapter was released on October 2, 2026. The changelog reveals a few breaking changes for developers.
Adapters in this version support only two MCP schema revisions. Clients which attempt to use a lower revision than what the server specifies will continue to work, but be served using the 2025-11-25 schema. Some generated classes and validators were removed in this version. Any invalid fields in the request will no longer be silently removed or fixed. Custom transports must now handle specific tasks instead of being general-purpose middlemen, and JSON-RPC batches are disallowed.
The new features include support for the 2026-07-28 revision and the sessionless discovery step. Tools registered to be called directly can now request input from the user, if needed, in the new revision. The new context object is now available which is not mutated during the request.
One significant change is now made for people who bundle the adapter inside their own plugin. Bundling is deprecated, and developers must now use the MCP Adapter plugin by installing it separately. There is a migration guide which lists all changes that need to be made.
Version 0.6.0 was released on August 12, 2026. It requires WordPress 6.9 and drops support of the standalone Abilities API plugin installation. This version also changes the way abilities exposed by default server are marked public and fixes several resource and metadata handling issues.
A follow-up version 0.6.1 was released next day to fix packaging error that could lead to fatal error on some sites. No API, hook or protocol level changes were introduced.
The plugin page describes MCP Adapter as being developed and supported by a community. The people listed as contributing to the plugin include WordPress.org, Ovidiu Galatan and David Levine. Bugs and feature requests are sent to the GitHub repository. A support forum is also available on WordPress.org.
For most site owners, nothing changes today. The adapter is a tool for developers, and for plugins that want to work with AI agents.
The benefit for developers is clear, since there’s now only one official plugin to build upon, which should reduce the risk of having competing versions, and development on the old bundled approach should stop soon.
Site owners that want to use AI tools to manage their content or settings should wait for plugins that register their capabilities and read what each one exposes before turning it on.
Q 1: What is the WordPress MCP Adapter?
It is an official plugin that connects WordPress to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol. It exposes WordPress abilities as MCP tools, resources and prompts.
Q 2: What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI systems to applications, data and tools. According to Search Engine Journal, it was developed by Anthropic.
Q 3: What is new about this release?
Version 0.7.0 is now published in the official WordPress.org plugin directory. Previously, releases were only available via GitHub.
Q 4: How many sites use it?
The plugin page shows more than 40,000 active installations.
Q 5: Does the plugin add AI features to my site?
No. The WordPress MCP Adapter plugin is the server and transport layer only – to use any AI features, you still need to install and configure appropriate abilities (either core ones or brought by other plugins).
Q 6: Does it expose everything automatically?
No. Exposing is done on a per-case basis. First, a capability has to be marked public, and second, user permissions have to be validated.
Q 7: What does my site need to run it?
WordPress 6.9 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher. It is tested up to WordPress 7.1.3.
Q 8: How do I install it?
Go to Plugins, then Add New in your WordPress admin, search for MCP Adapter and install it. You can also use WP-CLI.
Q 9: What changed for developers in 0.7.0?
It serves two MCP revisions, removes several classes and validators, rejects JSON-RPC batch requests and deprecates bundling the adapter as a library.
Q 10: Where do I report bugs?
Bugs should be reported in the GitHub repository. For security issues, the advisory in the project’s SECURITY.md file should be followed.
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