Learning objectives
By the end of this exercise, you will be able to:
- Register a custom ability on your WordPress site
- Connect the MCP Adapter so your ability is reachable by an external AI client
- Evaluate whether your ability is a candidate to share with the WordPress AI community
Before you begin
This requires a local development environment or live site with a connected AI provider, plus basic comfort editing a plugin or must-use plugin file. Complete Practical: Explore your site’s abilities first. Have a real piece of content ready to test against too: whatever ability you register, you’ll need something for it to actually read and act on, such as a paragraph of text for a summary ability or a small set of records for a lookup ability.
Registering a custom ability
Define a simple custom ability for your site, for example a lookup or summary task specific to your content, and register it using the Abilities API. Confirm it appears alongside the built-in abilities you explored earlier.
A custom ability you register yourself is unaffected by the Custom Abilities toggle covered in the previous practical. That toggle only controls whether the AI Plugin’s own built-in custom abilities are exposed. Your ability will be visible and public based on its own meta.public setting, not that toggle.
📸 Screenshot placeholder: the abilities list showing a newly registered custom ability alongside the built-in ones.
Connecting the MCP Adapter
Install and configure the MCP Adapter so your new ability is exposed to an external AI client. Test the connection by calling your ability from that client, using the content you prepared earlier, rather than from inside WordPress.
💡 Why this matters for you: This is the same pattern used across the whole WordPress AI stack: an ability defines what can be done, and the MCP Adapter makes it reachable beyond your site. Once you’ve built one, you can build more.
What you’ll have when you’re done: a working custom ability registered on your site and reachable through the MCP Adapter from an external AI client.
Get involved
If your ability turns out to be broadly useful, consider sharing it with the WordPress AI Team. The Abilities API code now lives in WordPress core (the standalone GitHub repository has been archived), so the best way in is the community itself:
- Join the #core-ai channel in the Making WordPress Slack
- Attend the Wednesday contributor call or the alternating Thursday office hours, both at 17:00 UTC, with details on the AI Team’s homepage
- Read the weekly contributor summaries at make.wordpress.org/ai to see what the team is currently prioritizing before you propose it
✅ Check your understanding
- What made you choose this particular ability to register, over other options?
- What would you need to change about your ability before it could be useful to someone outside your own site?