Build your first AI-Powered WordPress plugin

So you’ve heard about the WordPress Core AI projects. Maybe you’ve read the blog posts, skimmed the GitHub repositories, or watched a talk about what’s coming. But there’s a massive difference between understanding something conceptually and actually building with it. If that’s the case, then this workshop is for you.

In this workshop, you’ll learn to build a working AI-powered WordPress plugin from scratch. You’ll leave with functioning code on your laptop and a solid understanding of how each of these tools works, so you can start experimenting on your own.

What we’ll build:

We’re going to create a plugin that registers custom abilities, exposes them via the Model Context Protocol, and uses the WP AI Client to add intelligent behaviour. By the end, you’ll have a plugin that lets an AI assistant interact with your WordPress site—discovering what’s possible and taking actions on your behalf.

Prerequisites:

• A laptop with a local WordPress development environment that you are familiar with (I’ll be using WordPress Studio)
• WordPress 7.0-RC2 installed
• Familiarity with WordPress plugin development, PHP, and JavaScript
• Git, Composer and Node.js installed and working, the latest stable versions
• An API key from one of the following AI model providers:
  • Google
  • Anthropic
  • OpenAI
• If you prefer not to register an API Key with one of these providers, you can also install Ollama and a local model of your choice, but you will need to do this before the workshop.
  • These models should give you a working offline experience:
    • Google Gemma
    • Qwen
    • Mistral/Ministral
• One of the following MCP-compatible agentic AI applications:
  • Claude Desktop 
  • VS Code with GitHub Copilot
  • Cursor
  • Claude Code is also acceptable if you use that.
  • You may use your own MCP-compatible AI agent, but I won’t be able to support you if things go wrong.
• The patience to troubleshoot if things don’t work the first time (they rarely do, and that’s part of learning)

Fair warning: once you see an AI assistant execute an ability you wrote yourself, you’ll probably spend the rest of the weekend thinking of things to build. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.