Image generated via Nano Banana Pro. At this point the lava lamp is just a PoT icon.
Got ya with the headline didn’t I? That’s what we in the biz like to call “click-bait”. WordPress isn’t dead. The truth is I keep feeling the pull back to WordPress.
I know that's not a particularly exciting sentence for a newsletter about tech, and may not win friends with a certain kind holier-than-thou engineer. But it's true. In my past I’ve run meetups, spoke and organized at WordCamps and contributed to the open source community through WordPress.
Every few years someone declares WordPress dead and every few years I find myself building something new on it anyway. It's what I know and with everything else reinventing itself every quarter, there's something underrated about a platform that I (and millions of others) know works.
My photographer friend knows how WordPress works. My fitness trainer buddy knows how WordPress works. Hell, I could probably even teach my website factory grandmother-in-law how to post if I really wanted to.
WordPress has been quietly (by AI news standards) shipping real tools to bring AI agents to WordPress. The Abilities API introduced in WordPress 6.9 laid the groundwork for agents to discover WordPress functionality from core and plugins. Pair that with the WordPress MCP Adapter and you can have agents working on your WordPress sites locally or in production.
WordPress has the ecosystem. What it needs now is for developers to actually adopt these new AI features and build them into their products. Especially the folks maintaining legacy plugins that are still used but not exactly under active development. (Points finger at self.) WordPress is laying the groundwork for bringing AI tools into the platform that powers 40% of the web. Don’t sleep on it.
📰 Article
AI Building Blocks for WordPress
Make WordPress AI
The Wordpress core project has put together an AI Team that has laid out three pillars for the project: a PHP AI Client SDK that abstracts LLM providers so developers aren't locked into one, an Abilities API that turns WordPress into a central registry of everything the platform can do, and an MCP Adapter that exposes those capabilities to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. They’re going with the tried and true feature plugin to core feature strategy that has brought us the REST API and Block Editor.
Want to see who is building these tools? Check out the announcement of the WordPress AI Team.
📰 Article
Introducing the WordPress Abilities API
WordPress Developer Blog
Shipped in WordPress 6.9, this is the central capability registry that makes WordPress "legible" to AI agents. Plugins and themes declare what they can do through a standardized API, and the MCP Adapter exposes those capabilities to AI clients. More updates to come in WordPress 7.0, due out this week.
📰 Article
From Abilities to AI Agents: Introducing the WordPress MCP Adapter
WordPress Developer Blog
The bridge between the Abilities API and the Model Context Protocol. The MCP Adapter installs as a plugin and automatically exposes your site's capabilities as MCP tools that AI clients like Claude Code can discover and invoke. It's what makes what WordPress.com is doing (see below) possible.
Love him or hate him this bit from Matt Mullenweg’s post about his Taxonomist tool stuck with me as one of the things agentic coding is really useful for solving, the edge cases that aren’t worth a ton of effort but improve quality of life.
Every time I made a new post, it irked me a little, and I had this long-standing itch to go back and clean up all my categories, but I knew it was going to be a slog.
📰 Article
WordPress.com now lets AI agents write and publish posts
TechCrunch
WordPress.com's MCP integration now lets AI agents draft, edit, and publish content on your site — plus manage comments, fix metadata, and organize tags. Site owners toggle capabilities on and off at wordpress.com/mcp and connect their preferred AI client. Posts written by AI default to drafts, so there's a human in the loop. These features are built on the MCP Adapter and Abilities API being developed for WordPress Core and not just a WordPress.com feature.
Never quite understood the WordPress.org (free, open-source project) vs WordPress.com (Automattic’s paid platform)? Here’s a brief history I did waaaaay back in the day.
🔧 Tool
Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
Cloudflare Blog
And of course a WordPress issue wouldn’t be complete without some shiny new tool declaring the death of WordPress. This time released by Cloudflare and built upon Astro. It has some additionally cool features like sandboxed plugins that declare what permissions they need in order to run their functionality and then run using Cloudflare’s worker technology. They're trying to find their place as an agent-first CMS with built-in MCP, Agent Skills, and x402 payment support.
Obligatory follow-up post from Matt Mullenweg on his EmDash feedback.
Astro has been popping up with longtime WordPress personalities like Chris Lema and Joost de Valk (of Yoast fame) moving their blogs to the platform.
It makes me smile (either from nostalgia or past trauma) to see a TinyMCE-like WYSIWYG editor in the admin. That UI will outlive us all.
Thanks for reading,
Jason
