Summary

It’s no secret now, I’ve been working the past ~2 years on a new hosting startup, HonestHosting.io. It has been a crazy journey full of ups-and-downs, but one of the biggest challenges (across the board) is AI, MCP, and LLMs, and how it all relates to WordPress.

WordPress has been around forever, and as such, has an amazing amount of options (bloat?). At it’s core, WordPress is a publishing platform that allows the “simple stuff to be easy, and the complicated stuff to be possible”, which means it’s excelled at widespread adoption across a myriad of use-cases.

However, now that AI is obviously here to stay, one of the biggest challenges I faced from the start was “how are you going to integrate LLMs into your SaaS platform?”. I think LLMs are fantastically powerful and useful, but they can lead to a lot of Rube Goldberg contraptions that just add more bloat and costs if not carefully thought-out, planned, and executed.

The main cases I wanted to cover:

1. DO NOT expose LLM API keys directly to WordPress (DANGEROUS!)
2. Allow setting context (Site 1 vs Site 2) with intelligent discovery of “capabilities”
3. Even though it’s new and a bit fragile, use MCP Server and Tooling

The Abilities API allows all 3 goals to be achieved in any WordPress version >= 6.8.0. In fact, the Abilities API is now shipping by default with WordPress >= 6.9.

Example

On any site created on HonestHosting, we install an “umbrella” plugin that provides some base capabilities to make integrating with the environment smoother. One of those is an MCP Server instance:

In this default instance, we have 97 abilities registered. But the real power is when you log in to the HonestHosting console, and start a new chat session with the Site, asking it what capabilities it has, printing out the plugin capabilities in a nice Markdown table, installing a new plugin, re-running discover, and finally listing what new capabilities it has access to:

Next Steps

As you can see, this approach is incredibly powerful because it allows agentic patterns without requiring exposure of LLM API keys directly on WordPress sites (which we all know is a dangerous proposition).

With this approach “the sky is the limit” because it only extends WordPress capabilities as plugin authors pull in the Abilities API registrations. Additional information about Chat integration is also available on our docs site, docs.honesthosting.io.