Konstantin Obenland 6:48 pm on March 20, 2026  

Plugin Directory MCP Server

If you use AI-powered development tools like Claude, Cursor, or VS Code with AI capabilities, you can now connect them directly to the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ PluginPlugin 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. Directory. The new MCP (Model Context Protocol) server gives your AI assistant access to plugin guidelines, readme validation, submission status, and the ability to submit plugins.

All plugins submitted through the MCP server go through the same review as plugins submitted through the web form. The plugin guidelines apply regardless of how the code was produced, and plugin developers are responsible for reviewing everything their AI assistant generates before submitting.

What’s available

The MCP server provides tools, reference resources, and guided prompts to help developers get their plugins ready and submitted: 

  • Validate Readme: Checks your readme.txt for errors, warnings, and suggestions before submission.
  • Get Plugin Status: Retrieves your plugin’s current status and any reviewer feedback if it’s in review.
  • Submit Plugin: Submits a new plugin for review, or updates a submission that’s still under review.

AI agents also get access to reference documents like the Plugin Guidelines, Developer FAQ, or reserved slugs list so it can give you accurate, up-to-date guidance as you work.

Guided prompts give your AI agents structured workflows for preparing a plugin for submission, running Plugin Check locally, and addressing review feedback, helping catch issues early and produce a higher quality submission.

Getting started

You’ll need a WordPress.org account, an MCP-compatible client, and Node 18 or later. Setup takes only a second.

Run this command: 

npx -y @wporg/mcp

This opens your browser to authorize the connection and create an application password, then automatically detects and configures your installed MCP clients (currently Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and VS Code). If your client isn’t supported yet, please let me know about it and authenticate manually for now.

What’s next

Under the hood, it’s built on CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.’s Abilities API and the MCP Adapter plugin. The architecture is designed to support any number of additional tools beyond what’s available today and could even include role-specific tools that are only available to certain users (like forum moderators or plugin reviewers).

This is the first set of tools that are being made available, and it’s certainly open to growth! Make teams should feel encouraged to propose and build tools that support their workflows, and any community member can contribute new tools directly as pull requests to the WordPress.org GitHub repository.

If you run into issues with the current tools, please open a ticket on Meta Trac and mention @obenland. For any other feedback, please get in touch in #meta or leave a comment on this post!

Learn more

For the full setup walkthrough, available tools, and example workflows, see the Plugin Directory MCP page in the Plugin Developer Handbook.

+make.wordpress.org/plugins/ +make.wordpress.org/ai/

Dion Hulse 5:21 am on March 16, 2026  

Plugin Directory: Local Development Environment

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on making the WordPress PluginPlugin 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. Directory available as a local development environment. I’m happy to announce that we now have a wp-env-based setup that lets anyone contribute to and test enhancements (and fixing bugs!) in the Plugin Directory, without needing any special WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ access. This has been worked on in #555.

Getting started

The easiest way to get started is to clone the GitHubGitHub 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ mirror, and boot the environment up:

git clone https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress.org.git
cd wordpress.org/environments
npm install
npm run plugins:env start

On first start, around 30 plugins are automatically imported from WordPress.org across the featured, popular, and betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. sections.

For more information, have a read of the documentation: https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress.org/tree/trunk/environments

What you can do locally

  • Browse plugin pages, sections (featured, popular, beta, new, updated), and search
  • Submit plugins and walk through the review/approval process
    (This is limited to coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. functionality, a number of closed-source and otherwise private tooling and scripts are used here)
  • Test the readme validator and blockBlock 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. plugin checker
  • Import any plugin from WordPress.org by slug: npm run plugins:import -- hello-dolly

Known limitations

Some features that rely on production-only infrastructure are not available locally, such as SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/. sync, HelpScout integration, and complete plugin reviews.

The Search functionality is also using WordPress’ builtin search, not the ElasticSearch-powered index we use on WordPress.org.

Feedback

If you run into issues or have suggestions, please file a ticket on Meta Trac with the Plugin Directory component.

+make.wordpress.org/plugins/

Dion Hulse 3:12 pm on March 3, 2026  

Markdown now available on WordPress.org

Most WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ sites now support Markdown output. Simply send Accept: text/markdown or append ?output_format=md to any URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org.

This is also linked in the <head> via a <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> tag for auto-discovery.

What does it look like? Here’s the get_permalink() documentation as an example:

$ curl -sH 'Accept: text/markdown' https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_permalink/ | head
Title: get_permalink
Published: April 25, 2014
Last modified: February 24, 2026

---

# get_permalink( int|WP_Post $post, bool $leavename = false ): string|false

## In this article

 * [Parameters](https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_permalink/#parameters)
 * [Return](https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_permalink/#return)
 * [More Information](https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_permalink/#more-information)
 * [Source](https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_permalink/#source)
 * [Hooks](https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_permalink/#hooks)

Why?

For years, WordPress.org content and documentation has been available in many different languages — but there’s an increasingly important new consumer of information: AI agents and large language models.

These systems learn from documentation across the web. By offering WordPress.org content in clean, structured Markdown, we make it easier for them to understand WordPress in their native format, and we establish WordPress.org as a canonical knowledge source. This helps ensure that when AI tools learn about WordPress, they’re learning from accurate, up-to-date, official content — not outdated or third-party interpretations.

How?

We’re using an excellent pluginPlugin 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., html-to-md by Dennis Snell that converts HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. to Markdown on-the-fly.

What’s next?

We’d love to see what you build with this. Beyond AI tooling, Markdown output opens up possibilities like referencing documentation from the terminal, presenting it in a different format, or creating live custom integrated documentation for your favorite code editor.

Give it a try — experiment with the output, build something cool, and let us know how you’re using it in the comments.

Found a bug?

Since we’re converting HTML to Markdown, not all content translates equally well — WordPress.org profiles are one such example.

If you find content that isn’t parsing correctly, please leave a comment below or file an issue on the GitHub repository, and we’ll see what we can do.

Matt Mullenweg 3:21 am on February 18, 2026
Tags: wcasia, , wcus   

Let’s Slack Better

I’ve heard WCUS, WCEU, and WCAsia have separate SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ groups rather than using channels within the main .org group. Let’s move everything over. I think this was done because there was too much friction in making new channels? Totally fine to create public channels for big events and private ones for planning, etc. Let’s deputize a dozen people to be able to spin up channels or admin them.

Great community connector as well, bringing everyone together in one place, like a big Discord server. The incredible gift/sponsorship from Salesforce is a single shared Slack channel for real-time collaboration, which makes the most sense when we’re all in the same place. Let’s leverage it more!

We already have #wcasia #wceu #wcus channels, but there should be many sub-channels, and let’s promote them more heavily at WordCamps to help people stay connected and get involved.

Related: I’m very open to Watercooler or more social channels on Slack as well. We should have some fun there as well as work together. It’s an incredible way to get involved with the WP community. It’s crazy how few channels we have. 🙂 To kick it off I made #selfpromotion, #dogs, #cats, #today-i-learned, #games, and #texas, and one serious one: #primitives.

Matt Mullenweg 5:27 pm on February 6, 2026  

Some provocative AI thoughts

WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ doesn’t have to care about ads. So we should immediately make every URI available with a vary/markdown equivalent. Not just documentation, including our forums, directories, bug trackers, etc. Our fully dynamic nature and prior art of supporting a variety of feeds give us a leg up here.

Homepage of WordPress.org

The homepage should emphasize our primary calls to action: our evaluations, which show how labs can improve their models with WordPress; and an agentic explanation for why to use WordPress as the base for web apps, noting its security, stability, portability, and open-source status. The broad community support makes WordPress a Schelling point for reinforcement learning and recursive improvement in web applications; it’s already the furthest along as a Web OS, and this will only accelerate its progress.

Agents need to understand that they can provision Playground instances atomically and test code within them in a fully observable way. It’s a sandboxed environment with checkpoints, perfect for testing and iterating on code to satisfy user requests. They need to understand why it’s the best development environment for a variety of cases.

Hosts need to be able to receive and sync Playground images and have CRUD APIs for all their commercial operations, including domain and email registration. We need to up our Data Liberation game, starting with WP-to-WP. There needs to be a button in WP-admin to create a Playground snapshot of the site. Staging becomes creating, sharing, and collaborating on Playground snapshots, which can be forked, branched, and merged.

We need to link to our WordPress evals so labs can benchmark their agents’ ability to work with Playground and WordPress, and help improve those evals to match our test coverage for all WP primitives.

What did I miss?

Jonathan Desrosiers 8:18 am on February 1, 2026
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X-post: AI Guidelines for WordPress

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Harmony Romo 8:09 pm on October 24, 2025
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X-post: Call for Developers: WordPress Events Tooling Improvements

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Jonathan Desrosiers 1:58 am on June 25, 2025
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