AcrossAI MCP Manager turns your WordPress site into a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Claude, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Codex, Windsurf, Zed and more connect straight to your site and can read, write and act on it — using WordPress’s own Application Passwords, with per-server access control you configure.

The Model Context Protocol is the standard Anthropic introduced and the AI industry adopted: it lets an AI assistant discover and call tools on a service through one common interface. This plugin implements that server inside WordPress, so any MCP-capable AI becomes a WordPress co-pilot.

Setup takes about a minute via the Quick Setup wizard — install, click through the guided flow, paste the ready-made JSON into your AI client, done.

Documentation: acrossai.co/docs · Use cases: acrossai.co/use-cases · Integrations: acrossai.co/integrations · Full changelog: acrossai.co/changelog

Every section below links to the relevant page. Source and issues live at github.com/acrossai-co/acrossai-mcp-manager.

Your Site Is the MCP Server — No Relay, No Third Party

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the main thing that separates this plugin from the alternatives.

There is no middleman. The free plugin makes zero outbound HTTP requests of its own — no telemetry, no phone-home, no proxy, no hosted relay. Your MCP endpoint is a route on your own site, and your AI client talks to it directly. The npx bridge that some clients use runs on your own computer, not on anyone’s server.

That means your content never passes through a third party’s infrastructure, there is no account to create with us to make it work, no service that has to stay online for your site to keep working, and nothing to migrate if you stop using the plugin. Your credentials are WordPress Application Passwords, issued by your own site and revocable from your own profile page.

A plugin that relays your site through its vendor’s servers has to disclose that. This one has nothing to disclose.

Connect Claude to WordPress

Works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code in the terminal, and Claude on the web. Open the server’s connect tab, pick Claude, generate an Application Password with one click, copy the ready-made JSON into the config file path the screen shows you, and restart Claude. From then on, ask Claude to draft a post, fix a page, audit site health or reorganise a taxonomy, and it acts on your live site rather than describing what you should click.

Connect an AI client

Connect ChatGPT and Grok to WordPress

ChatGPT and Grok connect through AI Connectors, the one-click flow in the separate AcrossAI Pro add-on (Pro). Pro covers Claude, Gemini and Cursor the same way — paste one URL, approve the consent screen on your own site, done. No config file to edit.

Worth knowing: Pro does not change the no-middleman model. The OAuth server runs on your own site, not on ours — there is still no third-party cloud between your AI and your WordPress.

Everything else on this page — all 16 built-in clients, every server, every access rule — is free.

AI Connectors

16 Built-In AI Clients, Configured For You

Pick your client and the plugin renders the exact config file path, the exact top-level key that client expects, and copy-paste-ready JSON:

Claude Desktop · Claude Code · VS Code · GitHub Copilot · Codex · Cursor · Gemini CLI · Cline · Roo Code · Kilo Code · Amazon Q Developer · OpenCode · Antigravity · Windsurf · Zed · and a Custom Client template for anything else that speaks MCP.

Every one uses the same transport underneath, so nothing is second-class. A new client can be registered from your own code through a filter — no fork required.

What Your AI Can Actually Do

On its own, this plugin is the server, the security and the plumbing. Install the free companion AcrossAI Abilities Manager and your AI gains 357 abilities across 14 toolsets on any WordPress site, rising to over 800 across 32 toolsets as it detects the plugins you already run.

Content — create and update posts, pages and any custom post type with their meta and revisions; moderate comments; manage the media library, categories and tags; run semantic search to find related content and propose, review and apply internal links.
Blocks — read and surgically edit a page’s block tree without rewriting the page, build from patterns, generate sections and landing pages, audit copy and design.
Appearance — theme.json and global styles, site-editor templates and template parts, navigation menus, widget areas, fonts, and site title, logo and icon.
Users — create and edit users, reset passwords, create roles, grant or revoke individual capabilities.
Configuration — read and write any option including values nested inside serialised arrays, change permalinks, and walk the admin menu to find which screen a setting lives on.
Database — inspect schema and table sizes, audit index health and bloated autoloaded options, EXPLAIN a slow query, optimise tables, or run a serialisation-safe search-and-replace.
Files — browse, read, write and delete files inside an administrator-defined allowlist; take and extract zip backups; read and edit wp-config constants; read the debug log.
Cron — see every scheduled task, spot the overdue ones, run one on demand, and prove whether WP-Cron is firing at all.
Updates — search the WordPress.org directory, install and update plugins, themes and core, roll back, and verify files against official checksums.
Diagnostics — Site Health, maintenance mode, recent fatal errors, un-pause what WordPress auto-disabled, and bisect a plugin conflict without ever writing active_plugins.
Cache — transients, object cache and rewrite rules.

Plugins you already run get dedicated toolsets, active only when that plugin is: WooCommerce, Elementor (and Pro), Rank Math, Yoast SEO, LiteSpeed Cache, Contact Form 7, WPCode, CookieYes, WP Mail SMTP, The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, Loco Translate, Classic Editor, Advanced Custom Fields, Akismet, WPForms, UpdraftPlus and All-in-One WP Migration.

Browse every integration

Decide Exactly What Each AI Can Touch

Nobody should hand an AI assistant their whole site by default, so this plugin does not.

Tool curation — choose precisely which abilities a server advertises. A server can offer three tools or three hundred.
Per-ability exposure — switch individual abilities on or off per server, with search, filters and bulk actions, plus a server-level default for everything you have not decided individually.
Read-only servers are easy — roughly half the ability catalogue is annotated read-only and only about 13% is flagged destructive, so a “look but don’t touch” server is a matter of filtering.
Permission override — an explicit, per-server opt-in that is off by default.

Tools and abilities

Administrator-Only by Default

A brand-new MCP server requires manage_options until you say otherwise. Then gate it by user, role, capability, or your own policy provider. Every MCP request passes the gate — tool calls, resource reads and prompt requests alike — and denials are observable through hooks.

The gate is deliberately fail-closed: if the access-control package is unavailable, a server falls back to administrator-only rather than opening up.

Access control

Run More Than One MCP Server

Create as many servers as you need, each with its own route, namespace, version, enable switch, tool set, ability exposure, access rules and connect message. One locked-down read-only server for a client’s AI and one full-access server for yourself, on the same site, without interfering with each other.

MCP servers

Three Ways to Connect

MCP Client (npx bridge) — the default. Paste JSON into Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and the rest. Uses @automattic/mcp-wordpress-remote with an Application Password. Docs
CLI connections with browser approval — one command in the terminal, one click in the browser, zero password copying. Every approved, successful and failed attempt is recorded in a per-server audit log. Off by default. Docs
WP-CLI (STDIO) — the client launches WP-CLI as a subprocess, so no credential crosses the network at all. Ideal for local development and CI. Docs

AcrossAI Pro — the Optional Paid Add-On

Everything above this point is free. AcrossAI Pro is a separate plugin that adds the following, and nothing here is required to run an MCP server:

One-click AI connectors (Pro) — ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Cursor. Paste one URL into the AI client, approve the consent screen on your own site, and you are connected. No config file, no Application Password to copy.
n8n connection — Beta (Pro) — connect your site to n8n workflows using a generated bearer token or an Application Password, with a chosen lifetime and one-click revocation. Off by default, and labelled Beta in the plugin itself: n8n’s own MCP OAuth credential is not yet OAuth 2.1 compliant, so this path is deliberately token-based rather than OAuth.
An OAuth 2.1 authorization server, on your own site (Pro) — authorization and token endpoints, mandatory PKCE (S256), refresh-token rotation with reuse detection, dynamic client registration, and metadata discovery. The clients, tokens and authorization codes are rows in your database. This is what makes one-click connectors possible without a vendor relay.
Connections dashboard (Pro) — see every AI client currently connected to each server, and revoke any one of them.
Membership-aware access control (Pro) — gate an MCP server by membership or course enrolment instead of only by WordPress role, across 10 platforms: BuddyBoss, MemberPress, LearnDash, LifterLMS, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, WooCommerce Memberships, s2Member, Wishlist Member and Memberium.
276 more abilities (Pro) — deep coverage for LearnDash (74), BuddyBoss (60), MailerPress (89 plus 28 for MailerPress Pro) and GeoDirectory (25), each active only when that plugin is.

Pro keeps the same model as the free plugin: it runs on your own server, with no third-party cloud, and actions are never metered or credited. Plans start at a 30-day free trial with no card required, and every plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. Local and staging sites do not count against your site limit.

Plans and pricing · AI Connectors docs

For Site Owners, Developers and Agencies

Site owners write, edit and publish through conversation with the AI they already pay for, without learning a new admin screen and without their content touching a third party.

Developers get a real WordPress MCP server with a documented extension surface: register a client, a server tab, a connect method or a server type through filters, no fork required. WP-CLI STDIO keeps credentials off the network entirely on local boxes.

Agencies run a separate server per client site with its own access rules, hand each client an AI connection scoped to exactly what they should reach, and keep an audit log of terminal approvals.

Real-world use cases

Built on the WordPress Abilities API

WordPress 6.9 introduced the Abilities API so plugins can declare self-describing operations an AI can discover and run. This plugin exposes those abilities as MCP tools, which means any plugin that registers abilities becomes reachable by your AI with no custom integration — including your own.

Privacy and Data

The free plugin sends nothing anywhere. No analytics, no usage reporting, no external service.

The only outbound connection is WordPress core’s own plugin installer reaching WordPress.org, and only when you click to install a companion plugin from the setup wizard.

Uninstalling is non-destructive by default: your servers, rules and logs survive unless you explicitly tick the delete-all-data option first.

Extend It

Clients, server tabs, connect methods and server types are all registered through filters — acrossai_mcp_client_classes, acrossai_mcp_manager_server_tabs, acrossai_mcp_manager_connect_methods, acrossai_mcp_server_types — plus action hooks on access-control denials and CLI approvals. Add your own from a plugin of your own.

Full Feature List

Self-hosted MCP server — your site is the endpoint, and the plugin makes zero outbound requests
Multiple MCP servers per site, each independently routed, versioned and enabled
16 built-in AI-client guides with copy-paste JSON and the exact config path per client
Three transports: npx bridge, CLI browser-approval, and WP-CLI STDIO
WordPress Application Passwords — generated in one click, revocable from your profile
Per-server tool curation and per-ability exposure, with search, filters and bulk actions
Per-server access control by user, role, capability or custom provider — administrator-only until you change it
Per-server custom connect message for the AI client
CLI connection audit log covering approved, successful and failed attempts
Guided Quick Connect wizard, plus a full manual path
Optional request logging through the free MCP Tracker plugin
Tunable ability-discovery page size with a live token-cost estimate
Non-destructive uninstall by default
Filter-based extension surface for clients, tabs, connect methods and server types
Works with the free AcrossAI Abilities Manager add-on for 357+ abilities across 14 toolsets

Optionally, with AcrossAI Pro: one-click connectors for five AI vendors, an OAuth 2.1 server on your own site, a connections dashboard, membership-aware access control across 10 platforms, 276 more abilities, and an n8n connection in Beta. See the section above for detail.

Requirements

WordPress 7.0 or higher
PHP 8.1 or higher
WordPress Application Passwords (built into WordPress since 5.6; requires HTTPS)

Support

Documentation — acrossai.co/docs
MCP Manager docs — acrossai.co/doc-category/mcp-manager
Use cases — acrossai.co/use-cases
Integrations — acrossai.co/integrations
Full changelog — acrossai.co/changelog
Troubleshooting & FAQ — acrossai.co/docs/mcp-faq-troubleshooting
Source code + issue tracker — github.com/acrossai-co/acrossai-mcp-manager

Support & Contribution

For issues, feature requests, or contributions, visit the plugin repository.

Questions? Check the FAQ section or look for documentation in the plugin settings page.

Development

This plugin follows WordPress coding standards and best practices:
– PHP 7.4+ compatible
– Full object-oriented architecture
– Secure nonce verification
– Proper capability checks
– Sanitized input validation
– Escaped output

License

This plugin is licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. See LICENSE file for details.

Credits

MCP Manager is built with:
– WordPress native APIs
– Automattic’s MCP WordPress Remote package
– WordPress Application Passwords system

Developed with ❤️ for the WordPress community.

AcrossAI MCP Manager – MCP Server for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor & Any AI Agent