tooling 6 min read

WordForge: AI-Powered WordPress Management via MCP

Building an open-source MCP server because Shopify fees felt wrong and no free alternatives existed.

WordPress MCP AI WooCommerce Self-Hosting Open Source

My girlfriend started doing pottery. Beautiful handcrafted pieces that deserved an online presence. The obvious solution? Shopify. The actual solution? A 3€/month VPS, WordPress, and building my own AI integration because apparently nobody had done it properly yet.

The Problem: Shopify Isn’t For Me

Don’t get me wrong, Shopify is excellent for what it does. But it represents everything I try to avoid:

Centralized control: Your shop lives on their infrastructure, their rules
Lock-in: Moving away means rebuilding everything
Fees: Transaction fees on top of subscription fees add up fast
No real control: Want to customize something deeply? Good luck.

For a small pottery business, these tradeoffs didn’t make sense. I’d rather invest time upfront for long-term freedom.

The Setup: Hetzner + WordPress

The alternative was straightforward:

Infrastructure: A Hetzner VPS for 3€/month. More powerful than most managed cloud instances, with full SSH access. Later I’ll spawn a second one as backup.

Platform: WordPress with WooCommerce. Battle-tested, extensible, and my girlfriend can manage it herself through the admin panel. She wanted full control, not to depend on me for every change.

The catch: Manual configuration. No managed services means setting up everything yourself: SSL, backups, security, updates. Worth it for the control, but it adds friction.

The real friction, though, came from an unexpected place: I couldn’t use my AI dev tools with WordPress.

The Frustration: AI Tools Don’t Speak WordPress

I live in AI-assisted development. Claude, OpenCode, cursor: they’re part of my daily workflow. But when it came to helping my girlfriend update her WordPress site, I was stuck in the admin panel clicking through menus like it’s 2010.

I could have built a custom theme with code she’d never touch. But she explicitly didn’t want that, she wanted to understand and control her own site. Fair enough.

So I looked for MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for WordPress. The concept is simple: expose WordPress functionality through a standardized protocol that AI tools can consume. Let Claude update posts, manage products, tweak styles, all through conversation.

What I found: Nothing. Or more precisely, nothing free and comprehensive.

WordPress’s own team had started working on this with two projects:

Abilities API: A standardized way to register WordPress capabilities
MCP Adapter: Bridges the Abilities API to the MCP protocol

Great foundation. But the Abilities API is just that: an API. You still need to actually register abilities for the things you want to do. Content management, WooCommerce products, Gutenberg blocks, theme styling… none of that was implemented.

The Solution: WordForge

So I built WordForge.

WordForge extends the WordPress MCP Adapter with a comprehensive set of abilities for real-world WordPress management:

Content Management

List, create, update, delete posts, pages, and custom post types
Full support for taxonomies, meta fields, and featured images
Pagination and filtering built-in

Media Library

Upload, update, delete media files
Update alt text, captions, descriptions (critical for SEO)
Support for URL and base64 uploads

Gutenberg Blocks

Get and update page block structures
Auto-create revisions before changes
Parse blocks in full or simplified format

Theme Styling (FSE)

Global styles (theme.json): colors, typography, spacing
Block styles: view registered block variations
Full Site Editing compatible

WooCommerce

Product CRUD: simple, variable, grouped, external products
Stock management, pricing, categories, tags
Auto-detected: abilities only register when WooCommerce is active

Architecture: Standing on WordPress’s Shoulders

WordForge follows the official WordPress MCP Adapter’s ability pattern:

wordforge.php              → Plugin bootstrap
includes/
├── AbilityRegistry.php    → Registers all abilities with MCP
└── Abilities/
    ├── AbstractAbility.php → Base class with helpers
    ├── Content/            → Post/page CRUD
    ├── Media/              → Media library management
    ├── Taxonomy/           → Categories, tags, custom taxonomies
    ├── Blocks/             → Gutenberg operations
    ├── Templates/          → FSE templates management
    ├── Styles/             → Theme styling
    ├── Prompts/            → AI prompt templates
    └── WooCommerce/        → Product management

Each ability defines:

get_title() / get_description(): Metadata for MCP
get_input_schema(): JSON Schema for parameters
get_capability(): Required WordPress capability
execute(): The actual operation

The beauty of this architecture: it’s fully declarative. Add a new ability, register it, and it’s immediately available to any MCP client.

Installation: Two Parts

1. WordPress Plugin

Install WordForge on your WordPress via uploading the wordforge.zip from the GitHub releases

The plugin requires:

PHP 8.0+
WordPress 6.4+

2. MCP Client Configuration

For Claude Desktop: Download wordforge.mcpb from the releases and double-click to install.

For OpenCode (my daily driver): Add to your .opencode.json:

{
  "mcp": {
    "wordpress": {
      "enabled": true,
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["node", "./path/to/wordforge-server.js"],
      "environment": {
        "WORDPRESS_URL": "https://emmaye.fr/wp-json/wp-abilities/v1",
        "WORDPRESS_USERNAME": "your-username",
        "WORDPRESS_APP_PASSWORD": "xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx"
      }
    }
  }
}

Generate an Application Password in WordPress under Users → Profile → Application Passwords.

Real Usage: Managing emmaye.fr

Now my girlfriend manages emmaye.fr, her pottery shop, through Claude conversations:

“Add a new product called ‘Bol Rustique’ priced at 35€, in the ‘Bols’ category, with 3 items in stock”

Claude calls wordforge/save-product with the right parameters. Done.

“Update the homepage hero section to say ‘Pièces uniques façonnées à la main’”

Claude fetches the page blocks, updates the content, creates a revision. Done.

“What products are running low on stock?”

Claude lists products filtered by stock status. Done.

She’s not a developer. She doesn’t need to be. The WordPress admin panel is still there when she wants fine-grained control. But for quick updates, product additions, content tweaks, a conversation is faster.

And personally, I use OpenCode to help her with more complex changes. Same tools I use for development, now applied to WordPress management.

What’s Next

WordForge is open source and actively maintained. Current priorities:

More WooCommerce abilities: Orders, customers, coupons
Better prompts: AI-optimized prompts for common tasks
Multi-site support: Managing multiple WordPress instances
Backup integration: Before making changes, snapshot the state

The goal isn’t to replace WordPress’s admin interface: it’s to augment it with conversational AI for those who want it.

Why Open Source This?

I was genuinely surprised that no free, comprehensive WordPress MCP integration existed. The WordPress team built the foundation (Abilities API + MCP Adapter), but the actual abilities were missing.

So I built what I needed and open-sourced it. Maybe someone else has a partner starting a small business, or wants to manage their blog through Claude, or just prefers conversation over clicking.

The WordPress ecosystem deserves AI tooling that isn’t locked behind paywalls.