Stop Doing It Yourself: Building AI-Powered Admin Tools with the WordPress AI API

WordCamp Portugal 2026

Presented by Ryan Welcher & JuanMa Garrido — Developer Advocates, Automattic

Pre-Workshop Setup Checklist

To avoid wifi bottlenecks on the day, please complete this before you arrive:

1. WordPress Studio — Download and install WordPress Studio.

2. Create a site from the blueprint — Download the blueprint.json file from this repository. In Studio, click Add site → Start from a blueprint → Choose blueprint file and select the downloaded file.

   When the Add a site dialog appears, expand Advanced settings and set the WordPress version to 7.0-RC4 (listed under Beta & Nightly in the version dropdown). All other settings can be left as their defaults.

   

   Important: The site will fail to be created if the WordPress version is not set to 7.0-RC4.

   Once the version is set, click Add site. Studio will install all required plugins and the workshop plugin with everything activated and ready to go.

3. Node.js v20+ — Recommended via NVM:

   nvm install 20 && nvm use 20

4. Install JS dependencies in the workshop plugin directory:

   cd /path/to/your/studio/site/wp-content/plugins/wcpt-2026-ai-workshop-trunk
   npm install

   Studio installs the plugin from trunk.zip, so the directory ends up named wcpt-2026-ai-workshop-trunk (with the -trunk suffix). Use that path here.

5. Configure an API key in your Studio site's WordPress admin under Settings → Connectors. Any of the following will work:

   • Anthropic (Text generation with Claude)
   • OpenAI (Text and image generation with GPT and DALL·E)
   • Google (Text and image generation with Gemini and Imagen)

Not using Studio? For any other local WordPress installation you will need:

• WordPress Beta Tester — install and activate it, then go to Tools → Beta Testing and switch to the WordPress 7.0 RC channel to update your site to 7.0 RC4.

• AI plugin — install and activate from the WordPress plugin directory.

• This workshop plugin — clone the repo into your wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it:

  cd /path/to/your/site/wp-content/plugins/
  git clone https://github.com/wptrainingteam/wcpt-2026-ai-workshop
  cd wcpt-2026-ai-workshop
  npm install
  wp plugin activate wcpt-2026-ai-workshop

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Welcome!

Thanks for joining us today! We have 3.5 hours together — about 90 minutes of guided instruction, then a 2-hour hackathon. We'll move at a steady pace, but there's room for questions along the way.

What Are We Building?

WordPress 7.0 RC4 brings together three AI building blocks for the first time:

• PHP AI Client — new in 7.0 core: a provider-agnostic PHP SDK for talking to AI models (wp_ai_client_prompt())
• Abilities API — server-side PHP shipped in 6.9; the JavaScript client API (@wordpress/abilities) is new in 7.0
• MCP support — provided by the mcp-adapter package (bundled with the AI plugin), which exposes abilities opted in via meta.mcp.public to MCP-compatible agents like Claude Desktop and Cursor

We're going to build a simplified Content Summarization plugin from scratch. It's the same feature that ships in the official WordPress/ai reference plugin — stripped down so every line is understandable.

By the end of the guided section you will have:

• A WordPress plugin that connects to an AI provider
• A registered Ability callable via the REST API
• A block editor button that generates a summary and inserts it as a quote block at the top of the post

Then you'll have 2 hours to build whatever you want using the same patterns.

Structure

There are 5 guided sections (1 tour + 3 coding + 1 MCP demo) plus a 2-hour hackathon. Each section builds on the previous one.

The plugin in the repo root is intentionally a scaffold — empty includes/ and src/ directories with just a plugin header. You'll fill it in as the workshop progresses. If you fall behind or want a clean start, the code-reference/ folders contain the complete state of the code at the end of each coding section.

Note on code-reference/section-2/: this snapshot contains a temporary smoke-test function that Section 3 begins by deleting. If you copy section-2 forward as a starting point, remove wcpt_test_ai_connection (and its add_action call) before continuing.

Section ↔ code-reference mapping:

Section	Code reference	State
1 — Tour AI Experiments Plugin	no code	Exploration only
2 — Scaffold + AI API	code-reference/section-2/	Plugin stub + smoke-test AI request
3 — Register the Ability	code-reference/section-3/	Ability registered, callable via REST
4 — Block Editor Integration	code-reference/section-4/	Complete plugin
5 — MCP Demo	no code	Presenter-led demo
6 — Hackathon	self-directed	Build your own ability

Let's go! → Section 1: Tour the AI Experiments Plugin