Filter Abilities is our open-source plugin that gives AI assistants like Claude direct access to your WordPress content, SEO data, and visitor analytics.
WordPress 6.9 shipped one of its most consequential updates in years: the Abilities API. When paired with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and a purpose-built abilities plugin, the result is transformative: an AI assistant that can talk directly to your WordPress site, understand its content, manage its SEO, and analyse your visitor data.
At Filter, we have been building exactly this. Here is how we did it and what it enables.
The Abilities API, introduced in WordPress 6.9 as part of the AI Building Blocks initiative, provides a central registry where WordPress core, plugins, and themes can register discrete units of functionality in a machine-readable format. Each registered “ability” includes its inputs, outputs, permission requirements, and execution logic.
Before the Abilities API, if an external tool wanted to interact with a WordPress site, it needed to know the specific endpoint, authentication method, and payload format for each individual feature. The Abilities API solves this by creating a single, discoverable catalogue of everything a site can do.
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that defines how AI applications provide and receive context, a universal language that allows AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others to discover available tools and use them in a structured, predictable way.
The important thing to understand is that MCP is not WordPress-specific. By supporting MCP, WordPress positions itself to work with any AI tool that speaks the same language
The official WordPress MCP Adapter plugin acts as the bridge between the Abilities API and the MCP specification. It takes every ability registered on your WordPress site and automatically converts them into MCP tools that AI agents can discover and execute.
This is where our open-source Filter Abilities Lite plugin comes in. We built it to expose the day-to-day WordPress operations that a digital team actually needs. The Lite version registers 21 abilities across the core modules most teams rely on:
Content Management: List, retrieve, create, update, delete, and bulk-manage posts of any type, with taxonomy support and optional Advanced Custom Fields handling when ACF is active.
Taxonomy Management: List terms and create, update, or delete terms from any registered public taxonomy.
Media Library: Browse media assets, identify images missing alt text, and sideload remote media into the library with titles, captions, descriptions, parent posts, featured-image assignment, and migration mapping support.
Migration Tools: Rewrite media references across post content, Gutenberg block attributes, image classes, gallery shortcodes, featured images, and ACF media fields using a safe dry-run-first workflow.
Site Health: Retrieve useful environment details including WordPress version, active theme and plugins, post types, taxonomies, detected modules, and content statistics.
Block Editing: Read Gutenberg content as a structured block tree, list available block types, and make targeted block edits without regenerating an entire post or breaking block markup. This includes updating, inserting, deleting, mutating, and batching block changes.
Getting this running involves three steps. Install the WordPress MCP Adapter and Filter Abilities Lite plugins and activate both. Create a dedicated WordPress user for MCP access, name it something like claude-agent, and generate an Application Password from the user’s profile. An Editor role is sufficient for most operations. Finally, add a server entry to your AI client’s MCP configuration file pointing to your WordPress MCP endpoint with those credentials. After restarting, the WordPress tools appear automatically.
The setup takes less than an hour. For a full walkthrough of every module and configuration step, read our detailed guide.
Once connected, you can ask Claude to find all contacts who visited your services pages this week using PersonalizeWP data, surface all posts missing SEO titles and fix them in one workflow, query how many form submissions came in last month without logging into WordPress, or create a draft blog post with the right categories and tags applied directly in your CMS.
The Abilities API opens WordPress up to chat clients in a standardised way. Plugin developers register abilities once; the MCP Adapter handles the rest. WordPress 6.9 shipped this into core in December 2025, and WordPress 7.0 is already extending it with a client-side JavaScript counterpart. While other CMS platforms are still working out AI integration, WordPress has shipped a production-ready API for exactly this purpose.
Filter Abilities Lite is open source and available on GitHub at filter-agency/filter-abilities-lite. The setup takes less than an hour. For a full walkthrough of every module and configuration step, read our detailed guide. If you have questions, ideas for new abilities, or want to contribute, find us on GitHub or get in touch using the form below.
CTO & Founder
Having worked in agencies since he left university, Paul drives both the technical output at Filter, as well as being responsible for planning. His key strengths are quickly understanding client briefs and being able to communicate complex solutions in a clear and simple manner.
Game On: A World Cup Summer At Filter
Not everyone at Filter follows football. But everyone likes feeling part of something. Here is how we are marking the 2026 World Cup as a team, and the wall chart we built to bring it all together. FIFA World Cup 2026 The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off on 11 June and runs through to...
