Roots: the release where the plugin starts paying for itself

7.1 Roots is live. It is the biggest release since I launched Respira, and it is a cumulative roll-forward, so a WordPress site on any 6.x or 7.0 build moves straight to it with nothing to break.

I named it Roots on purpose. Respira is infrastructure. It sits underneath the WordPress site, holds the work up, and the people using the site never see it. A name that pointed at the surface would have been the wrong name.

Here is the whole release in one place, and where to go if you want to read deeper on any part.

A rebuilt admin

The plugin's wp-admin is now a React-first interface, dark by default, with a one-click light theme. There is a live view of the bridge between three things: your agent, Respira, and your WordPress site, so you can see the connection working rather than guess at it. Command-K jumps you anywhere. Every edit an agent makes is reviewable, with a full diff you can approve or roll back. The old classic admin is gone, every screen is the new shell now.

You can click through the real interface with stub data before you install anything. It is linked from the release notes.

Playbooks

This is the headline, and it is the one I am most proud of.

Your agent does some workflows over and over. Create a case study. Audit a page for accessibility. Duplicate, edit, and publish. Until now each of those was an instruction-by-instruction run every single time. With Playbooks, the agent crystallizes a workflow once into a typed JSON composition, Respira registers it as a WordPress Ability, and from that moment it is a single callable tool that runs on any connected WordPress site.

Author once. Every future run is one call, about 200 bytes of agent context instead of a long back-and-forth.

It is production-safe by construction, which matters more than it sounds. Destructive tools are refused at the moment a Playbook is created, not after the damage is done, with a hint to split the flow. Cycle detection caps recursion. Every step still routes through the same duplicate-before-edit, audit, and snapshot belt as everything else in Respira.

Read the spec and how to author one on the Playbooks page.

Every plugin your agent can already talk to

This is the part I think matters most for where WordPress is going, and it is the one people miss.

WordPress 6.9 introduced the Abilities API. Plugins can now register callable abilities through wp_register_ability, and any MCP server can expose those abilities to an AI agent. 19 plugins have adopted it so far, reaching more than 30 million active installs combined, names you already run: Advanced Custom Fields, Elementor, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and more.

Here is the thing. Your WordPress site already exposes far more than Respira's own tools. The plugins you already paid for ship their own abilities. Most setups never use them, because letting an agent call them blind, with no snapshot and no way back, is not safe.

Respira's Inhale gateway picks every one of them up automatically and wraps each call in the same belt as everything else: snapshot before write, structured errors, one-click rollback. You choose which abilities your agent is allowed to see. Then any agent can call them safely. The directory currently lists 163 abilities across the adopting plugins, refreshed weekly, each one linking back to the exact line in the plugin's source where it is registered so you can verify the contract yourself.

So the agent does not just get Respira. It gets the whole plugin ecosystem already running on your WordPress site, made safe to use.

Browse the directory on the Abilities page.

Reports you can hand a client

The release notes call Roots the release where the plugin starts paying for itself per client, and this is why.

There is a new tool that reads a month of work on a WordPress site, totals the edits, the snapshots taken, the hours saved against real per-tool baselines, and an estimated value when you supply an hourly rate. Then it hands your agent six framings of that data, from a personal recap to a full agency client report written in plain language a client can actually read, with an anonymize toggle for case studies.

Your audit log was always there. Now it becomes the thing you send the client at the end of the month.

Four new page builders, and Divi went deep

Coverage went from 12 to 16 builders. Spectra, Kadence Blocks, and GenerateBlocks join with full read and write. SeedProd comes in audit-only for now, the agent reads and reports on landing pages but writes are blocked, because SeedProd's proprietary layout format is not documented finely enough to risk corrupting a paying customer's landing page. Write support lands in a 7.1.x point release once the schema is properly reverse-engineered.

The builders Respira already supported went deeper too. The Divi adapter went from 16 hand-curated modules to the full 108-module catalogue, scanned automatically from the live Divi catalogue every week, including the six new modules Elegant Themes shipped this year. Elementor got an atomic v4 write path. Bricks went from 12 to 70 elements with design-token and breakpoint endpoints.

Builder by builder, it is all in the release notes.

Custom structures, no PHP

Your agent can now provision a custom post type, a custom taxonomy, and an ACF field group in three tool calls. No PHP file written, no plugin installed, no filesystem touched. The definitions are stored in WordPress options and registered against core on init, with a server-side slug allowlist and reserved WordPress and WooCommerce slugs refused. The "agent provisions structure" gap is closed without ever touching plugin files.

Connect from anywhere

There is now a native MCP endpoint on your WordPress site. Point Claude or ChatGPT at it with a link and a key. Nothing to install, and it works from the web or your phone. The local desktop setup is still there if you prefer it, but you no longer need a desktop app to connect.

Skills, on every plan

35 open-source skills ship inside the plugin, on every plan including the trial, nine of them new in this release. These are the agent-readable recipes for migrations, audits, SEO work, and more.

Browse them on the skills page.

What carried forward

Everything Roots adds still inherits the five invariants that have held since Bloom: a render-validation gate that fetches and parses the page after every write, a universal write-trace on every adapter, a consistent variables CRUD shape across color, typography, spacing, and breakpoints, catalog auto-scanning instead of hand-curated registries, and typed validators across every field. New surface, same seatbelt.

Where to start

If you already run Respira, update and open the new admin. The Reports tab and the Playbooks tab are the two new things worth five minutes today.

If you are deciding which plan fits, the Maker plan covers one WordPress site, Builder covers five, and Studio scales to 250. Pricing is on the pricing page.

And the full release notes, with the interactive admin preview and the builder-by-builder breakdown, live on the 7.1.0 release page.

Thank you to everyone who has been building alongside me. Roots is the most of myself I have put into a single release, and it is better for the people who told me what they needed.

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— mihai