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Markdown Feeds: detect and warn when another plugin already serves Markdown to agents #1188
Description
Follow-up to #1166.
What problem does this address?
Other plugins already serve Markdown versions of WordPress content to AI agents, for example Roots' Post Content to Markdown (Accept: text/markdown, ?format=markdown, .md URLs, rel="alternate" discovery) and Markdown for AI Agents (Accept negotiation with Vary: Accept). With one of these active alongside the Markdown Feeds experiment:
- Both plugins answer the same front-end requests (ours on
template_redirect), so which output wins depends on hook order. - Both print
<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">tags, so agents see two Markdown URLs per page. - Two plugins doing
Acceptnegotiation make the page-cacheVaryrisk harder to reason about.
The llms.txt proposal (#918) has the same issue with SEO and llms.txt plugins.
What is your proposed solution?
- Detect known Markdown-serving plugins and show a notice in the Markdown Feeds toggle description in Settings > AI naming the conflicting plugin.
- Document the overlap in
docs/experiments/markdown-feeds.md. - Separately agree a shared detect-and-defer policy (warn vs. disable overlapping parts) that Markdown Feeds, llms.txt, and Meta Description can follow.
Activity
dhrupo commentedon Oct 16, 2026
I'd like to pick this up. Before I start, here's the scope I have in mind for the first PR, to check it matches what you want:
Detection. A small detector following the existing
SEO_Integration::detect_active_plugin()pattern (is_plugin_active()against a list of known plugin files, filterable so other plugins can add or remove themselves). Starting list:markdown-for-ai-agents)llm-markdown)mescio-for-agents)Notice. When one of these is active, the Markdown Feeds toggle description in Settings > AI names it and says both plugins may answer the same Markdown requests and print duplicate
rel="alternate"links. Warn only, with no behaviour change in this PR.Docs. A "Conflicts with other Markdown plugins" section in
docs/experiments/markdown-feeds.md.Out of scope for now: the shared detect-and-defer policy for Markdown Feeds, llms.txt (#918) and Meta Description. I'd keep the detector generic enough to reuse once that's agreed.
Does that sound right, or would you rather settle the defer policy first?