MCP Servers

This plugin helps in configuring and exposing MCP servers on your WordPress site with the selected abilities.

Installation

Add the plugin from Plugins/Add New/Upload. After the first install, the plugin updates automatically.

Download the MCP Servers plugin

You can find the plugin on GitHub.

Using the MCP server

To use the MCP server, the AI agent must authenticate. I suggest those steps.

  1. Create a user with username “mcp” and the “administrator” role (read more below)
  2. Add an application password, copy it, for Basic Auth or read below if your AI agente requires OAuth2

The basic credentials to use by your AI agent are the “mcp” username and the application password, after you remove the spaces (it should work with the spaces, but I faced some problems).

About the new user role, “administrator” could be too privileged; you should lower it to the level you need.

Note: since each exposed ability has its own permission check, it’s not easy to understand the right minimum role you need.

Mistral works with those credentials; Claude Desktop doesn’t.

Claude Desktop with OAuth2

Claude Desktop supports only OAuth2 to authenticate with an MCP server, but WordPress is missing it. You should install a plugin, like WP Oauth Server.

  1. Install WP Oauth Server (I’ve tried only this one, but it isn’t the only one)
  2. Go to its settings page and enable the OAuth server (important, I missed this step the first time).
  3. Create a client and get the client ID and the client secret (those are the credentials required to connect the AI agent)
  4. Be sure to set the reference WP user for this client to the “mcp” user

Follow your AI agent’s instructions to complete the connection.

Claude Desktop with Basic Auth

Claude Desktop does not support Basic Auth natively; you need a “local” MCP server proxy.

Please find online how to install the mcp-remote to have a local proxy for a remote (you site) MCP server.

To configure Claude Desktop with npx mcp-remote, don’t follow the instructions you find on various sites where the username and password are specified; you need the token that you can generate on this site.

Then you need to configure the MCP server as in the claude_desktop_config.json. The configuration can be found by clicking on your name on the bottom left of Claude Desktop, choosing Settings, then Developer, and searching for the button “Edit Config”.

Please keep a copy of the configuration elsewhere, since Claude Desktop resets it if something is wrong! I lost it a few times…

"Your Server Name": {
  "command": "npx",
  "args": [
    "mcp-remote",
    "your MCP server URL as in the the server list",
    "--header",
    "Authorization: Basic <token>"
  ]
}

Replace the Authorization: Basic ... with the one generated by the site. NodeJS, npx, and mcp-remote must be installed.

Under Windows: do not install NodeJS in C:\Program Files but inside a folder without spaces in the name, like C:\Tools. The space in the folder name creates problems for some programs… and those problems are not very easy to understand.

If no tools are listed…

It happens with some abilities schema declaration. Start enabling the basic abilities, for example, the categories “Site” or “User”. Always completely restart Claude Desktop and check if something has changed.

Logging and Debugging

If WP_DEBUG is set to true, the plugin logs to the error_log internal events.

If the logging setting is active, the MCP server’s activities are logged and accessible from the “logs” page.