WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” shipped today. The substrate just changed.

WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" shipped today at 18:41 UTC, named in honor of Louis Armstrong. 900+ contributors. 279 first-time contributors. More than 420 enhancements and fixes. Four years after WordPress 6.0, the project has earned the version bump.

This is the AI version.

The Abilities API is in core. The AI Client is in core. The Connectors screen is in core, with 3 presets that let site owners get started in a few clicks and add their own connections from one central hub. WordPress 7.0 also introduces a new Client-Side Abilities package: a JavaScript counterpart to the Abilities API with a built-in UI and a command palette accessible from anywhere in the admin.

WordPress 7.0 makes AI a foundation primitive, not a plugin afterthought.

It is the kind of architectural choice that shapes the next decade of WordPress.

If you have been building on top of WordPress for a long time and you watched 5.0 land with Gutenberg and 6.0 land with full-site editing, you already know what the cadence implies. 7.0 is the AI cadence. It is the year the substrate changes.

Twenty-three years next week. The project keeps choosing the harder, better path.

The one small gap

There is one small gap in the picture that ships with 7.0. The official MCP Adapter plugin, which connects WordPress's abilities to the Model Context Protocol (the open spec that lets AI assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop talk to any tool that implements it), registers no abilities publicly by default. Every ability your AI assistant can see is an ability it can call, so the safety posture is right. The opt-in needs to happen ability by ability, with eyes open.

The documented workaround is a PHP filter in a mu-plugin.

add_filter('wp_register_ability_args', function ($args, $name) {
    if (in_array($name, ['core/get-posts', 'core/get-pages'], true)) {
        $args['show_in_rest'] = true;
    }
    return $args;
}, 10, 2);

It works. It is also a pattern, not a product. You should not need to write PHP to grant an AI assistant read access to your pages.

Inhale: the settings page that replaces the filter

Inhale: MCP Abilities is the settings page that replaces the PHP filter. Install the plugin, go to Settings → Inhale: MCP Abilities, tick the abilities you want exposed to your default MCP server. Destructive abilities ask for a second confirmation. Read-only and idempotent abilities show their badges so you can choose with informed eyes. The connection section gives you the endpoint URL and ready-to-paste configuration snippets for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Claude Code. Light and dark mode. No telemetry. No external network requests. No abilities of its own.

Open source, GPL-2.0, on GitHub at respira-press/inhale-mcp-abilities. Free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

It is the smallest possible step toward a WordPress site that uses AI safely. The directory team approved it this week, in time for 7.0. That feels right.

What ships next

Respira for WordPress Lite is next. 130+ abilities across the 12 page builders Gutenberg does not cover. Read access on all of them. Write access metered at 30 edits per month. Snapshot-before-write safety. Same builder-native edit approach Respira Pro uses. In the directory review queue now. When it lands, this post gets an addendum.

Thanks

Until then: thank you to every person who shipped Armstrong. The core AI team. The release squad. The 900+ contributors and the 279 first-time contributors. The contributor blog post writers who documented the workaround so people like me knew exactly which gap to close.

The open web is still the right bet.

Inhale: MCP Abilities is free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. It requires WordPress 6.8+ and the official MCP Adapter plugin. The WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" release announcement and the field guide have the full developer notes.