WordForge: AI-Powered WordPress Management via MCP

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

By Quentin NivelaisDecember 29, 20256 min readUpdated September 17, 2026

WordPressMCPAIWooCommerceSelf-HostingOpen 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. (I even built an orchestrator so AI agents can run unsupervised.) 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+

Working on your own WordPress plugin? I wrote about shipping one that doesn’t tank your store’s performance.

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. If you want to see MCP orchestrate more than a shop, L’Atelier uses an MCP server to dispatch AI coding agents from Slack.