OpenStation vs Royal MCP – Secure AI Connector for Claude, ChatGPT & any LLM via MCP

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.

The most complete WordPress MCP server — 170+ tools, OAuth 2.0, and nothing leaves your site. Royal MCP gives Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Mistral, and every other MCP-compatible AI structured access to your WordPress site: 85 WordPress core tools plus 99 integration tools that auto-load for WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi, Advanced Custom Fields, Yoast SEO, UpdraftPlus, WPForms, and more. Connect Claude to WordPress Royal MCP connects your WordPress site directly to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or Claude.ai. Setup takes a minute or less: install the connector, authorize, and start your chat. Edit Elementor with Claude First-time setup walkthrough: royalplugins.com/support/royal-mcp/connecting-to-claude/ Connect ChatGPT to WordPress ChatGPT on the web, desktop, and iOS supports MCP servers natively. Add Royal MCP in ChatGPT’s Plugins panel, authorize once, and ChatGPT can read your posts, publish drafts, update product prices, moderate comments, and audit SEO across your site — all through ordinary conversation. Works with every MCP-compatible AI client Royal MCP is not vendor-locked. Claude/Anthropic, ChatGPT/OpenAI, Gemini/Google, Grok/xAI, Llama/Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen/Alibaba, Cohere, and Perplexity all work through MCP-compatible clients like Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Continue, Zed, JetBrains AI Assistant, OpenCode, Warp, Ollama, and LM Studio, all connecting through the same endpoint. Switch AI vendors without rewriting a single connection. How Royal MCP handles authorization Royal MCP speaks full OAuth 2.0 with PKCE and Dynamic Client Registration (RFC 7591) for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, ChatGPT web, and every modern MCP client. Sessions expire, refresh automatically, and can be revoked globally with one button in wp-admin. Clients that don’t speak OAuth get timing-safe API-key auth, per-IP rate limits (60 requests per minute), and the same activity log for every tool call. Where do my credentials go? Nowhere. Your AI client authenticates straight to your WordPress site, and every API key, OAuth token, session, and audit-log entry stays inside your own database. There’s no hosted server sitting between your chat and your site, and no license check or telemetry reaching out on activation. Ollama and LM Studio are first-class platforms alongside Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini if you want to keep AI inference local too. Can I undo what the AI does? Yes. Every MCP client (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, and the rest) asks you to approve or deny each destructive tool call by default, until you flip that setting in your connector. On top of that, Royal MCP captures a reverse-state snapshot before every destructive write and hands back a 72-hour undo token. One mcp_undo_last_operation call reverses the change — whether Claude deleted a post, replaced text on an Elementor page, updated a WooCommerce product, or reordered menu items. New posts and pages start as drafts, so nothing the AI writes appears on your live site until you approve publishing. Every tool call also lands in an activity log you can review from wp-admin. Does Royal MCP work with the WordPress Abilities API? Yes. Royal MCP surfaces every AI-callable operation through one endpoint, from three sources: the 85 native tools Royal MCP ships, the 99 integration tools that auto-load when WooCommerce, Elementor, Divi, ACF, Yoast SEO, UpdraftPlus, WPForms, and other supported plugins activate, and every ability any plugin registers through WordPress 6.9’s Abilities API. Your AI sees them all as MCP tools — one connector, no per-plugin setup, no per-vendor rewrite. See what AI agents do to your site The free Royal AI Firewall companion shows every AI agent hitting your site at the HTTP layer (training crawlers, retrieval bots, AI search engines), not just the ones connected through Royal MCP. Install both for a unified view across MCP tool calls and HTTP-layer bot hits. 85 Core Tools + 99 Integration Tools WordPress Core (85 tools): Posts – create, read, update, delete, search, count (any registered public post type, featured images supported) Pages – full CRUD with parent page support Post Types – discover all registered public post types on the site Post Revisions – list revision history and roll a post back to any prior version Media – browse, upload from URL or base64, update alt text/caption/title/description, set as featured image, delete Comments – create, read, delete; full moderation suite (list pending, approve, mark spam, trash) Users – display names and roles (emails and usernames are not exposed) Categories & Tags & Custom Taxonomies – create, update (rename/re-slug/edit/move), delete, assign, count, discover all registered taxonomies Term Meta – read, update, delete (most useful for term-level SEO meta – titles, descriptions, focus keywords stored against categories and tags) Menus – create menus, list menus, list menu items, create / update / delete / reorder menu items Publish and Promote – publish a draft and insert it into a menu in one call, so agents can complete “publish the post and add it to the main nav” in a single tool call Preview Links – generate a shareable draft-preview URL for a single preview session so reviewers can see unpublished changes without a WP login Post Meta – read, update, delete custom fields (works with ACF, MetaBox, JetEngine, Pods, CPT UI) SEO Meta – read and write Yoast SEO, Rank Math, AIOSEO, or SEObolt title/description/focus keyword/robots/OG fields (auto-detects active SEO plugin) SEO Audit – fetch a post’s actual rendered HTML and report title, meta description, canonical, viewport, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags (catches conflicts that only appear in served output) Widgets – list widget instances (optionally filtered by sidebar), list registered sidebars, and update widget content; writes gated by the theme-appearance admin toggle Find and Replace – literal find/replace inside post/page content with dry-run preview, expected-count safety check, and read-after-write verification Undo – reverse the previous delete or reorder within 72 hours via mcp_undo_last_operation Site Info – site name, description, WordPress version, timezone Site Status – full site health snapshot (WordPress version, PHP version, active theme, active plugins, cron activity) for AI-driven pre-write validation Error Log – read recent PHP error log entries so AI agents can diagnose silent failures without shell access Cron Schedule – list scheduled WP cron events with next-run timestamps and hook names Connection Health – MCP session diagnostic returning route, auth method, session ID, and Royal MCP version details for any authenticated caller Plugins & Themes – list installed plugins and themes with active status Theme Appearance – get active theme, read/write theme mods (gated by admin toggle + allowlist), read/write Custom CSS Search – full-text content search across post types Permalink Structure – read and update permalink settings (gated by admin toggle) Options – read allowlisted core options, read full plugin settings by slug (sensitive keys redacted), and write to allowlisted options when an admin enables it Plugin Integrations (Conditional) Royal MCP automatically detects compatible plugins and adds specialized MCP tools. No configuration needed — if the plugin is active, the tools appear. WooCommerce Integration (29 tools): When WooCommerce is active, AI agents can manage your store end-to-end: Browse and search products by category, status, or type Create and update simple and variable products with prices, SKUs, stock levels Manage variable products — list, get, create, update, delete, and batch-update product variations Manage global attributes (pa_* taxonomies) — list registered attributes, list attribute terms, register new attributes, assign attributes to a product as variation axes Manage coupons — list, search by code, get, create, update, delete (trash or permanent), and bulk-purge trash; supports all standard WC coupon fields (discount type, expiry, usage limits, product/category restrictions, email allowlists) View orders, order details, and update order status Create and update orders and attach order notes — for B2B, wholesale, phone orders, and support-note trails List customers with order count and total spent Get store statistics — revenue, order count, average order value by period Elementor Integration (11 tools): When Elementor (free or Pro) is active, AI agents can clone and customize existing Elementor pages without trying to generate page-builder JSON from scratch: Clone an existing Elementor page with a new title and fresh element IDs (so the duplicate opens in the editor without ID collisions) Bulk-replace text across heading, text-editor, button, image-box, icon-box, icon-list, testimonial, tabs, accordion, toggle, star-rating, call-to-action, and flip-box widgets, including image alt and title on image, image-box, image-carousel, image-gallery, and basic-gallery widgets Swap image URLs across image, image-box, background_image, and gallery widget settings Get a compact outline of any page (section/container hierarchy with element IDs, widget types, text snippets) so Claude can reason over a full page in a few KB instead of the raw JSON Read full settings for a single widget/container/section/column by ID (for precise agent editing without loading the entire page tree) List saved templates from the Elementor template library and import templates from JSON Insert an existing library template onto any page at top, bottom, or after a specific element (the library-to-page bridge that the Elementor editor exposes as a two-click picker) Rebuild post_content from Elementor page data on a single page or across all pages with damaged post_content (repairs WordPress core search visibility and SEO auto-descriptions on pages built via prior clone operations) Every write returns a 72-hour undo token via mcp_undo_last_operation Atomic widgets (Elementor 4.0+ Editor V4 elements) pass through opaque — we never decode atomic schemas because Elementor itself may shift them. Widget-level creation from scratch is intentionally out of scope; the design commitment is to work from an existing-known-good source. Divi Integration (9 tools): When Divi (Divi 4 shortcode format or Divi 5 block format) is active, AI agents get safety-first tools for reading and editing Divi content without corrupting builder state: Detect a page’s Divi format (Divi 4 shortcodes, Divi 5 blocks, mixed, or non-Divi) from postmeta rather than the current theme version — so aged pages read correctly even after the theme was updated Get a compact page outline (section/row/module hierarchy with text snippets) so an agent can reason over a full Divi page in a few KB instead of raw markup Validate a Divi shortcode or block layout string before writing it, catching malformed structure before it corrupts the page List saved layouts from the Divi Library, optionally filtered by category or layout type Read a full Divi Library layout by ID for reuse or template extraction Find-and-replace text inside Divi content with dry-run preview, expected-count safety check, active-editor-session detection, and a warning when literal escape sequences appear in the replacement Clone a Divi 4 or Divi 5 page as a new draft, preserving builder meta and regenerating D5 clientIds so the duplicate opens in the editor without ID collisions (72-hour undo token) Swap an image URL across every image-bearing Divi element on a post, dual-format aware for Divi 4 shortcodes and Divi 5 blocks (72-hour undo token) Apply a Divi Library entry to a target page in merge or replace mode (72-hour undo token) Advanced Custom Fields Integration (4 tools): When ACF (free or Pro) is active, AI agents can read and write ACF fields with the field-type-aware formatting the ACF UI uses — instead of the raw serialized values WordPress meta returns: Read a single ACF field, formatted per its Return Format setting (hydrated post objects, parsed repeater rows, image arrays, etc.) Read every ACF field on a post in one call, with name/label/type/value bundled — the most efficient way for an AI to discover what fields exist and read them all Update an ACF field with type-aware value handling (scalar for text/number, array for repeaters and flex content, post ID for relationships, attachment ID for images) Enumerate ACF field groups on the site, optionally filtered by post type — for AI-driven discovery of available custom fields before reading/writing Redirection Integration (4 tools): When John Godley’s Redirection plugin is active, AI agents can manage 301 / 302 / 307 redirects: List redirects with group + URL-substring filters Create new redirects (source, target, status code, regex, group, title) Update existing redirects (target, status, enabled state) List redirect groups Also auto-detected: Yoast SEO Integration (5 tools) — read/write Yoast meta (raw + resolved), capture JSON-LD schema graph, list indexed internal links, list Premium redirects UpdraftPlus Integration (4 tools) — list backups, read status, trigger async backups with entity filtering, read schedule WPForms Integration (4 tools) — list forms, read form schema, (Pro) list submissions, (Pro) read single submission Royal AI Firewall Integration (6 tools) — review AI bot traffic, dashboard stats, and set allow/block/challenge policies per bot signature GuardPress Integration (7 tools) — review your security score, run vulnerability scans, inspect failed logins and blocked IPs SiteVault Integration (6 tools) — list backups, trigger new ones, check progress, review schedules ForgeCache Integration (3 tools) — purge and inspect your page cache Royal Ledger Integration (4 tools) — review recurring software costs and masked license entries Royal Links Integration (3 tools) — manage branded short links and click stats Supported AI Platforms Claude (Anthropic) – Full MCP support via Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and VS Code OpenAI / ChatGPT – GPT-5.5, GPT-5, GPT-5 Mini, o3 Google Gemini – Gemini 3.5 Flash, 3.1 Flash-Lite Groq – Llama 3.3, Llama 3.1, GPT-OSS Azure OpenAI – Azure-hosted OpenAI deployments AWS Bedrock – Claude, Llama, Titan models Ollama / LM Studio – Local self-hosted models (no external data transmission) Custom MCP Servers – Connect to any MCP-compatible endpoint Compatible Clients & Frameworks Royal MCP works with any MCP-compliant client, IDE, or AI agent framework — no per-tool configuration required. Each entry below describes the specific integration path Royal MCP provides for that target, so customers can answer “will this work with the tool I already use?”: Desktop AI apps – Claude Desktop (native MCP connector via OAuth 2.0), ChatGPT Desktop, Gemini Advanced. AI code IDEs – Claude Code, VS Code (with MCP extension), Cursor, Windsurf, Continue, Cline, Zed, JetBrains AI Assistant. API testing tools – Postman, Bruno, Insomnia (use the API key in the X-Royal-MCP-API-Key header). Custom field plugins – Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) has dedicated acf_* tools that return values formatted per each field’s Return Format setting (the same way the ACF UI shows them). MetaBox, JetEngine, Pods, CPT UI, and Custom Field Suite are supported through the wp_get_post_meta / wp_update_post_meta tools, so AI agents can populate custom fields just like a human editor. Page builders – Elementor and Divi have dedicated tools for safe clone-and-customize workflows (Elementor: clone a page, find/replace text, swap images, get an outline, import templates; Divi: format detection, layout validation, page outline, library read, find/replace with builder-format awareness) – see the Tools list. …