As the open web evolves in the era of AI, WordPress must keep pace. To ensure our CMS remains the leading solution to democratize publishing, we are creating and maintaining a collection of projects that form technical Building Blocks for AI within the WordPress project.
These Building Blocks will allow users and developers alike to create powerful AI implementations within WordPress – pushing the CMS to serve more needs and be even more flexible than it already is. We have three immediate focuses and four deliverables. When used together, each contributes the required functionality to create anything from AI features, to workflows, to agents, both inside and outside of the software.
Each Building Block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. is listed below with a short description and a more detailed overview article linked for further reading.
The PHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. AI Client SDK is an abstraction to interact with LLMs and embedding models from any major provider in a unified way. This allows developers to implement AI-powered features rapidly while giving users the freedom to choose their preferred AI provider and/or model.
We’re building this as two distinct Composer packages: a platform-agnostic PHP AI Client SDK developed collaboratively with the wider PHP community, and a WordPress-specific package that adds REST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. endpoints, API An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. key management, and other foundational WordPress integrations. This approach ensures broad PHP ecosystem compatibility while providing seamless WordPress experiences.
The Abilities API transforms WordPress from a collection of isolated functions into a unified, discoverable system. By creating a central registry of capabilities, it allows AI agents, automation tools, and developers to understand and interact with everything WordPress can do – from CLI Command Line Interface. Terminal (Bash) in Mac, Command Prompt in Windows, or WP-CLI for WordPress. commands and REST API endpoints to custom logic and plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party functions.
The MCP (Model Context Protocol) Adapter allows WordPress to connect to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. It builds on the Abilities API to translate selected WordPress server-side abilities into a MCP server that exposes them as tools and resources.
Rather than hard-coding support for specific standards, we create Adapters, like this one, that translate between the Abilities API and external protocols. The MCP adapter is our first and most important implementation, positioning WordPress at the forefront of AI integration while maintaining the flexibility to support future standards.
The AI Experiments Plugin brings together all the AI Building Blocks into a unified experience. It serves as both a powerful tool for users and a reference implementation for developers, demonstrating how the PHP AI Client SDK, Abilities API, and MCP Adapter work together in practice.
Starting as WordPress’s AI laboratory for experimentation, the plugin may evolve into a full-fledged AI Feature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins.. It can provide an AI playground, WP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ integration, intelligent agents, and visual workflow builders – everything needed to explore and implement AI capabilities in WordPress.
To avoid early lock-in and maintain flexibility as AI technology rapidly evolves, we will use Canonical and Feature Plugins as a way to distribute these features to end consumers, while encapsulating the core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. functionality and logic of the API projects in Composer packages. This makes it easy for plugin developers to use these official Building Blocks even before they are considered for WordPress Core. It is extremely important that developers can and do use these projects in production, and the approach of using Composer packages is our answer to this – aligning with our “canonical first, Core when ready” philosophy.
This work directly overlaps with some of the largest components of the Phase 3: Collaboration roadmap. It unlocks unique, futuristic capabilities that can be added through plugins. Here are some examples:
We must plan for these building blocks to be surfaced to end users in this new Site Admin interface. We hope to make it easy for developers to create AI Agents, chatbots, workflow automations and more, using the AI Building Blocks, and surfacing functionality through the new Site Admin UI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing..
A logical and non-disruptive implementation of AI is within the Post Editor, specifically surfacing through Real-Time Collaboration and Commenting. Instead of working with human counterparts, comments could be assigned to AI, which would work to resolve them, creating a suggestion or proposed revision. Instead of collaborating in real time with people, why not collaborate with AI?
Using AI to create and edit media is becoming increasingly popular. Additionally, there are many smaller implementations that AI could help with: auto alt text and captioning, intelligent grouping, multimodal search capabilities, and more.
It’s our intention to craft our projects with the end implementations in mind. By WordPress version 7.0, any WordPress user – enterprise or blogger, developer or designer – should be able to access, use, and build powerful AI features to aid in furthering their digital presence on the open web. Before that, product owners and plugin developers will have a robust toolkit to build AI features into their own offerings, which will work seamlessly with whatever core additions we may make in the future.
How this is made available to Core is still an open question, as is much with such fundamental releases on the horizon. Over the next several months, we’ll explore which building blocks and features should be merged to Core or remain canonical. Questions like “should AI providers and content generation be included in Core,” “do we add an AI Agent as a canonical plugin,” and “which protocols should we support” will surface and be addressed in Hallway Hangouts, Make proposals, and #core-ai discussions.
We invite you to join in on the work and discussions. This journey will shape how millions publish and share ideas on the open web, and we can’t do it alone. Join the #core‑ai channel on WordPress Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., open Github GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ Issues, or begin contributing to the projects to help us build the next generation of AI tools for WordPress.
Resources and Repositories
Repositories
Reference Implementations
– The WordPress AI Team: Jeff, Felix, Pascal, James
#ai-building-blocks