MCP Logs vs OpenStation

AI agents talk to WordPress sites directly now. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and a growing list of MCP clients can connect to your site, read content, place orders, edit posts, or call any custom tool you expose. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the open standard that makes this possible. The problem is that by default you cannot see any of it. Requests arrive, things change, and there is no record of what an agent did, when it did it, or which user it acted as. MCP Logs writes a row for every MCP request the moment it hits your site. You get the route, the ability that was called, the user it acted as, the request body, the response, and whether it succeeded. All of it is browsable in a React admin page built with @wordpress/components, so it looks and behaves like the rest of WordPress. Version 1.1.0 adds the other half: detection rules that watch the traffic as it arrives, email alerts when one trips, and a kill switch that stops all MCP access in one click. A log you can actually search Filter by date range, ability name, and user. Sort any column, set page size between 10 and 500, and run full-text search across stored request and response bodies. Click a row to open the request and response in collapsible panels, copy either to your clipboard, or trace a single agent session end to end. Export the current view to CSV when you need to hand findings to someone else. Detection rules that run on every request Three rules evaluate after each logged request: Request velocity per session. Catches an agent stuck in a loop. Destructive tool use. Watches a list of abilities you nominate. It can populate that list for you by scanning previously seen tool names for delete, remove, and drop. Error storms. Catches an integration that has started failing. Each rule has its own enable toggle, threshold, time window, severity, and auto-disable setting. Detected events land in a Security Events tab with filters, stat cards, CSV export, and a per-event “mark as reviewed” so your queue reflects what you have already handled. Open any event and Session Replay steps through the full request timeline for that MCP session. Alerts arrive as HTML email stating whether the offending request ran or was blocked, with a one-click, nonce-protected link to disable MCP access. A 15-minute cooldown per rule and per session stops an alert storm. There is an optional daily digest, separate recipient lists for alerts and digests, and a test button so you can confirm delivery before you rely on it. A kill switch that keeps the record Turn off all MCP access from the admin screen, or let a detection rule trip it for you. Blocked requests are still logged before they are rejected, so the audit trail stays complete while access is off. Callers get a 503 explaining why access was disabled and when. A site-wide admin notice stays up until you turn it back on. Works with whichever MCP server you run MCP Logs is not an MCP server for your site and does not expose your content to agents. It detects requests by the Mcp-Session-Id header, which is part of the MCP transport spec, so traffic from any compliant server lands in the same table. If your site runs more than one, you get one log instead of several. Built for both halves of the audience If you run the site: install, activate, and open Tools then MCP Logs. There is no setup screen and no configuration. Logging starts the moment an MCP client makes a request. If you build on it: there is a full REST API covering every admin feature, authenticated via WordPress Application Passwords or WooCommerce API keys. The plugin is also MCP-aware itself, registering a server with ten abilities so an agent can introspect its own activity log. Source ships under src/ and builds with npm run build. Why log deletion is not exposed to AI agents The plugin registers ten MCP abilities. The two log-deletion abilities, clear-old-logs and clear-all-logs, are deliberately left out of that set. The same tool set reads log content that an untrusted caller can influence. Pairing that with a one-call wipe would let planted text steer an administrator’s agent into erasing the audit trail. Deletion stays available in the admin screen and over REST, where a human is doing it. Sites that accept the trade-off can re-add the abilities with the alfmcp_mcp_server_abilities filter. REST API Eighteen endpoints under /wp-json/activity-log-for-mcp/v1/: GET /requests for a list with filters, sort, and pagination GET /stats for totals, success rate, and calls per ability GET /sessions/{id} for every request in a session, in order GET /search for full-text search across routes, abilities, and bodies GET /errors for recent failed executions and HTTP errors GET /tool-performance for per-ability call count, error rate, and unique users GET /filters for distinct ability names and users GET /export-csv for a server-side streamed CSV download DELETE /requests to clear all logs DELETE /retention to delete logs older than a given date GET /security-events for detected events with filters and pagination GET /security-events/stats for alert counts, active sessions, and top rule over 7 days GET /security-events/export-csv for a CSV of detected events PUT /security-events/{id}/acknowledge to mark an event reviewed DELETE /security-events/clear-acknowledged to remove reviewed events GET|PUT /security-settings to read or update detection and alerting settings POST /security-settings/test-alert to send a test alert email MCP abilities The plugin registers an MCP server (activity-log-for-mcp-server) with ten abilities: get-activity for paginated log retrieval with filters get-stats for summary metrics with an optional date range get-activity-by-session for a full session trace, with optional body exclusion for lighter payloads search-activity for full-text search across stored requests and responses analyze-errors for recent errors with full details get-tool-performance for per-ability performance metrics get-security-events for detected events with filters get-security-stats for alert counts, active sessions, and top rule over 7 days acknowledge-event to mark a security event reviewed test-alert to send a test alert email Privacy and data handling Everything stays in your WordPress database. Logs live in {prefix}alfmcp_requests and detected events in {prefix}alfmcp_security_events. There is no telemetry, no third-party call, and no external dependency at runtime. Credential-bearing headers including Authorization, Cookie, and X-Api-Key are replaced with [redacted] before anything is written, so the log never becomes a store of replayable credentials. Add your own header names with the alfmcp_sensitive_headers filter. Request and response bodies are stored up to 64 KB each and truncated beyond that, adjustable with alfmcp_max_body_bytes. You control retention and can clear everything from the admin screen or over REST. Disclaimer MCP Logs is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any AI provider or the Model Context Protocol project. “MCP” and “Model Context Protocol” are referenced solely to describe the open protocol that this plugin observes. Privacy Policy MCP Logs records REST API requests that contain the Mcp-Session-Id header. Logged data includes request routes, methods, headers, bodies, response data, user IDs, and timestamps. Credential-bearing headers are redacted before storage. All data is stored in your WordPress database and is never transmitted to external services.

wp-admin forgets. OpenStation doesn’t. You know the moment. You’re deep in a post and you need one image from the Media Library. You click over, find it, click back, and everything you had going is gone. Your scroll position, your half-typed thought, the three other things you had queued up in your head. That’s not a bug you hit. That’s the design. wp-admin shows you one screen at a time, and every navigation throws the last one away. It has worked this way since 2003, like a fridge that empties itself every time you close the door. WordPress has rebuilt almost everything else. The editor, the site editor, the patterns, the styles. The admin’s one-screen-at-a-time model is the layer nobody touched. OpenStation touches it. Install it and admin screens become draggable, resizable windows. Edit a post while the Media Library sits open next to it. Drag an image from one window straight into the other. Keep comments open in the corner. Reload the browser and your window layout — open pages, positions, sizes, and window states — comes back where you left it. OpenStation itself is free, GPL, and opt-in per user. One click in the admin bar turns it on for you. One click turns it off. Nobody else on your site sees anything change, and deactivating the plugin restores the classic admin exactly. No Core patches and no lock-in. Optional AI providers may charge for their service. Built and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Tumblr. Work on more than one thing at once Admin pages open as windows, including pages added by most other plugins. Drag them, resize them, snap them, tile them, minimize them to a taskbar. The admin menu becomes a dock of icons. Two editors open at once is one click away. Never lose your place Moving between open windows leaves each page in place. Across reloads, OpenStation remembers your open pages, window positions, sizes and states, virtual desktops, and focus. Closing a window with unsaved changes warns you first. A desk you can actually put things on Drop posts, media, and links right onto the wallpaper. Sort them into folders. Trash them to a Trash that actually holds things. The stuff you’re working on this week can just sit out where you can see it. One desktop per job Virtual desktops, the way your operating system does them. One for writing. One for the store. One for comment triage. One for that redesign you keep poking at. Switch between them without closing anything. Find anything with Cmd+K The full WordPress command palette, plus slash commands from your plugins, all under one keystroke. Turn on the optional AI assistant and you can ask it things like “which post had the comment asking for the recipe?” and it searches your own content to answer. (Requires an AI provider configured in Settings → Connectors on WordPress 7.0+. Details under “External services” below.) See how your site fits together The Corkboard is an interactive, zoomable map of how your posts, pages, and products link to each other. Pan around it. Find the orphans. Find the hubs. Running a store? Orders, Products, Coupons, and Customers become browsable folders with stock and sale ribbons. Open a customer to see their lifetime spend and what they buy most. Follow a product to its buyers, or a coupon to who redeemed it. Make it yours Wallpapers, from color presets to animated scenes to your own photo. Live widgets pinned to the desktop: drafts, stats, recent comments, a focus timer. Uploadable desktop themes, including a built-in Legacy theme that brings the old WordPress blue back in one click. And Mio, a soft-body desk companion that drifts across your wallpaper and gets bumped around by your windows. Off by default. You’ll turn it on. For developers Extend OpenStation through documented PHP and JavaScript APIs. Register windows, icons, wallpapers, widgets, commands, and settings tabs through stable openstation_register_* PHP APIs and a typed JavaScript API; customize dock items through documented hooks; add AI tools with the WordPress Abilities API. Copy-paste examples live in the developer docs on GitHub. External services No external service is required for OpenStation’s desktop interface. The optional AI Assistant and two user-initiated enrichment features make the external requests described below. AI Assistant The optional AI Assistant sends data to the AI provider you configure in WordPress’s Settings → Connectors (for example OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). Generation is routed through WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI Client, which supplies the credentials stored in Connectors. The plugin never handles an API key itself. With no provider configured in Connectors, no external AI requests are made. When the AI Assistant is enabled and a user invokes it (via Cmd+K or the slash-command palette): What is sent: the user’s prompt, the conversation history for the active session, and tool-call metadata. The plugin’s built-in tools (search_posts, search_pages, search_comments) run WordPress’s native keyword search and may include excerpts of the matching posts/pages/comments in tool results, which are then sent back to the provider as part of the agentic loop. When it is sent: on user-initiated AI requests, and (if an administrator enables “Score new comments with AI”) on comment-save hooks for spam analysis. Posts, pages, and taxonomy terms are not sent automatically. Why it is sent: to obtain model completions and tool-call decisions that drive the AI Assistant. Who provides the service: whichever provider you configured in Settings → Connectors. Which provider (and endpoint) receives the data depends entirely on that configuration. Review the chosen provider’s own terms and privacy policy (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). URL shortcut favicons When an authorized user creates a desktop shortcut to an external URL, OpenStation asks that URL for its page HTML and favicon so the shortcut can display the site’s icon. The request is made from your WordPress server and sends the requested URL, the server’s IP address, an OpenStation user-agent string, and normal HTTP request metadata to the operator of that site. This happens only when a user creates the shortcut. The destination site’s terms and privacy policy apply. WordPress.org plugin information When an authorized user opens or refreshes parts of OpenStation’s Plugins window, OpenStation may request public plugin details, update metadata, and review excerpts from WordPress.org. These requests send plugin slugs, the site’s locale, and normal HTTP request metadata to WordPress.org. This information is used only to display and manage plugins. Review the WordPress.org Privacy Policy. OpenStation’s OAuth relay does not contact a service by itself. Third-party plugins that configure the relay may contact their own providers and are responsible for disclosing those services. Credits OpenStation is brought to you by Automattic. The plugin is open source under GPLv2-or-later; contributions are welcome on GitHub. Third-party libraries The plugin bundles the following third-party JavaScript library, loaded on demand only when a feature that needs it is in use: PixiJS (MIT License) — used by the Corkboard window, built-in canvas wallpapers (e.g. the animated WordPress logo), the Mio desk companion, and the Inkfall typing game. PixiJS is loaded from the plugin’s own assets/vendor/ directory; no CDN requests are made. Data files The Inkfall game’s word list (assets/games/inkfall/words.txt) is generated from the following sources (attribution also ships in the file’s header): FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave (CC-BY-SA 4.0) — English word-frequency ranking derived from the OpenSubtitles corpus. english-words by dwyl (Unlicense) — used as a validity filter. LDNOOBW English list (CC-BY 4.0) — used as an exclusion filter.