Enable Abilities for MCP vs ParseLess

Enable Abilities for MCP gives you full control over which WordPress Abilities are available to AI assistants through the MCP (Model Context Protocol) Adapter. WordPress 6.9 introduced the Abilities API, allowing external tools to discover and execute actions on your site. This plugin extends that functionality by registering a comprehensive set of content management abilities and providing a simple admin interface to toggle each one on or off. Connect from claude.ai with just a URL Since version 2.1 the plugin ships an embedded OAuth 2.1 server built for claude.ai custom connectors. Add your site in claude.ai → Settings → Connectors, log in with your WordPress user, approve the consent screen — connected. No Client ID, no Application Password, no local configuration. Works from the claude.ai web app, mobile apps, and Claude Desktop Each team member authenticates with their own WordPress account and role — a subscriber can never do what only an editor should Every ability execution lands in the activity log under the real user’s name Works on single sites, subdirectory installs, and multisite networks (network-activate so the main site serves the OAuth discovery documents for every subsite) Prefer tokens? Application Passwords (per-user) and a single-admin Bearer token connect Claude Desktop / Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, and Google Antigravity — the Connection tab generates ready-to-paste configuration for each client, and fills in your credentials automatically. Features 91 abilities organized in 18 categories: Core, Read, Write, SEO (Rank Math), SEO (SEOPress), SEO (Yoast), Navigation Menus, Utility, Multilanguage, Custom Post Types, WooCommerce, The Events Calendar, Code Snippets, JetEngine Options Pages, Elementor, LearnDash, Tutor LMS, and AI Agent Readiness (llms.txt) WooCommerce integration — dedicated abilities to manage products, orders, and customers using the native WooCommerce API (HPOS-compatible, formally declared) The Events Calendar integration — list, get, create, and update events with venue, organizer, and date filters claude.ai OAuth custom connector — connect from claude.ai (web, mobile, or desktop) with zero local setup: an embedded OAuth 2.1 server with Client ID Metadata Document (CIMD) support lets each user log in with their own WordPress account and role Admin dashboard with toggle switches for each ability Per-ability control — expose only what you need Third-party ability control — abilities registered by other MCP-ready plugins (e.g. Fluent Forms) appear in the same dashboard, grouped by plugin, with the same per-ability toggles; disabling one removes it from every MCP server on the site Secure by design — proper capability checks, input sanitization, and per-post permission validation WPCS compliant — fully passes WordPress Coding Standards (phpcs) MCP-ready — all abilities include show_in_rest and mcp.public metadata Available Abilities Read (safe, query-only): Get posts with filters (status, category, tag, search) Get single post details (content, SEO meta, featured image) Get categories, tags, pages, comments, media, and users Write (create & modify): Create, update, and delete posts Create categories and tags Create pages Moderate comments Reply to comments as the authenticated user Upload images from external URLs to the media library (with optional auto-assign as featured image) Duplicate any post, page, or custom post type item — including all post meta (ACF, SEO, featured image) and taxonomy terms; saved as a draft by default SEO — Rank Math: Get full Rank Math metadata for any post/page (title, description, keywords, robots, Open Graph, SEO score) Update Rank Math metadata: SEO title, description, focus keyword, canonical URL, robots, Open Graph, primary category, pillar content SEO — SEOPress: Get full SEOPress metadata for any post/page (title, description, focus keyword, robots, canonical, Open Graph, Twitter Card) Update SEOPress metadata: SEO title, description, focus keyword, canonical URL, robots directives, Open Graph, Twitter Card SEO — Yoast SEO: Get full Yoast SEO metadata for any post/page (title, description, focus keyphrase, canonical, robots, Open Graph, Twitter Card) Update Yoast SEO metadata: SEO title, description, focus keyphrase, canonical URL, robots (noindex, nofollow, advanced), Open Graph, Twitter Card Get Yoast sitemap index — fetch and parse the sitemap index, returning all registered sitemap URLs with last modification date Custom Post Types: List all registered custom post types with configuration and taxonomies Get items from any CPT with filtering, search, and taxonomy queries Get full details of a CPT item including all meta fields (WooCommerce, ACF, JetEngine, etc.) Create, update, and delete CPT items with taxonomy and meta field support Get CPT taxonomies with their terms Assign taxonomy terms to CPT items WooCommerce: List products with price, SKU, stock status, categories, and type Get full product detail including gallery, attributes, and variations Update product price, sale price, stock quantity, and status List orders with customer, total, status, and date (HPOS-compatible) Get full order detail: line items, billing/shipping, totals, and notes Update order status with optional note List customers with email, name, total spent, and order count The Events Calendar: List events with start/end date, venue, organizer, and date range filter Get full event detail with resolved venue address and organizer contact Create new events with title, description, dates, venue, and organizer Update existing events Navigation Menus: List menus with item counts and theme locations, and get one menu’s full item hierarchy Create a new menu, and add pages, posts, categories, tags, or custom URLs as items (with parent and position) Update an item’s title, URL, parent, or position Remove an item, assign a menu to a theme location, or delete a menu entirely (opt-in — destructive) Tutor LMS: Read a lesson’s video source configuration (type, value, and runtime) Set a lesson’s video source (external URL, YouTube, Vimeo, HTML5, or a third-party source such as Bunny.net) using Tutor’s own storage function — avoids the string-only limitation of the generic Update Post Meta ability, which Tutor cannot read back List courses, and get a single course’s full detail with its topics/lessons hierarchy Get a user’s enrollment status and completion progress for a course Get a user’s quiz attempt results, optionally filtered to a single quiz Enroll a user in a course, and unenroll them (both opt-in, manage_options only) Utility: Search and replace text in post content Site statistics overview (includes custom post type counts) Update any post meta field by exact key (with protected internal key blocklist) Requirements WordPress 6.9 or later (Abilities API) MCP Adapter plugin installed and configured PHP 8.0 or later

ParseLess serves your WordPress content as clean Markdown to AI crawlers (via User-Agent detection) and on manual ?format=md requests. Same URL, same content, none of the theme chrome, navigation, widgets, or page-builder scaffolding that AI bots and CLI tools don’t need. It also exposes /llms.txt for the emerging AI-indexing standard, so models know where to find your content. Who is this for? 1. Developers using Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or any CLI that feeds your own site content into an LLM. If you’ve ever piped a blog post into Claude or ChatGPT for analysis, rewriting, or summarization, you’ve watched it burn through tokens parsing nav menus, footer markup, and CSS classes that have nothing to do with your content. A typical WordPress page measured live: ~19,800 tokens of HTML for ~975 tokens of actual content — a 20x reduction just by stripping the theme. Heavy page-builder sites (Elementor, Divi) routinely hit 100x or more. That’s the difference between fitting a handful of pages in a context window and fitting dozens. Just append ?format=md to any post URL and pipe it straight into your tool of choice: curl https://yoursite.com/my-post/?format=md | claude "summarize this" 2. Site owners getting “high resource usage” warnings from their host because AI bots are hammering the site. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and a dozen others crawl WordPress sites constantly. Each request renders your full theme, runs widget queries, loads page-builder assets, and ships hundreds of KB of HTML per page — most of which the bot discards before extracting the actual text. ParseLess intercepts these crawls and serves a tiny Markdown payload instead. You keep the AEO/SEO benefit of being indexed by AI search, without paying the server cost of rendering your full theme for every bot hit. Typical impact on AI bot traffic (measured on real WordPress pages): 95%+ less bandwidth per crawled page (typically 15–30x smaller; e.g. a 79 KB page → 4 KB. Heavy page-builder sites see 100x+) ~60–80% fewer database queries per request ~60% lower peak PHP memory per request ~50–80% faster Time To First Byte (measured 54% on a content-heavy page, 67% on a short one) On a site with 500 posts crawled monthly by major AI bots, that’s roughly gigabytes → tens of megabytes of monthly bandwidth and a fraction of the cumulative PHP execution time Numbers vary by theme and content. Heavier setups (Elementor, Divi, Avada) see the biggest savings; lightweight themes see less dramatic but still meaningful gains. The conversion is cached as a transient, so repeated bot hits cost almost nothing. How it works AI crawlers are detected by User-Agent and served Markdown automatically — no configuration required. Humans, search engines, and unknown bots receive your normal HTML output. ParseLess never affects what real visitors see. The ?format=md query parameter works on any post URL for manual preview or CLI piping. /llms.txt is published at your site root with a list of available content for AI indexers. Conversion happens once per post and is cached. Subsequent requests serve a single transient read. Features Automatic Markdown for known AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai, and more) Manual preview and CLI access via ?format=md on any post URL /llms.txt endpoint for AI-indexing standards Respects noindex flags from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and Genesis Skips private, draft, password-protected, and trashed posts Works with all public post types (configurable) Optional YAML frontmatter (title, URL, author, date, categories, tags, excerpt) Transient-based caching with configurable TTL Settings page at Tools → ParseLess for detection mode, bot list, cache TTL, post types, and llms.txt control Per-post meta box with Markdown preview and copy-to-clipboard Extensible via filters: md4ai_bot_list, md4ai_supported_post_types, md4ai_markdown_output, md4ai_cache_ttl, md4ai_should_serve_markdown Privacy and data collection When logging is enabled (off by default), ParseLess records the following for each Markdown request: Post ID, URL, and request timestamp The full User-Agent header A salted SHA-256 hash of the requester’s IP address (the raw IP is never stored) Matched bot identifier, bytes served, and whether the response came from cache IP hashes cannot be reversed from an email address, so the WordPress privacy exporter/eraser tools will report no personal data on demand. Logs are pruned daily according to the configured retention window (7/30/90/365 days, default 30). Site owners can disable logging or click “Delete all logged requests” at any time from Tools → ParseLess.