This is the capstone course of the track, and it assumes you’re arriving with real
mileage already: a registered ability, a live MCP server, connected clients, and a
working knowledge of permission_callback hardening, Application Passwords, and the
meta.mcp.public gate. Nothing here re-explains what an ability is or how
wp_register_ability() works. Instead, this course takes everything from Courses 1
through 7 and asks the questions a senior developer or a platform team actually faces
once a single working integration needs to become a production system: how do you
design abilities other developers can safely extend, how do you run many MCP servers
on one site without them colliding, how do you know what’s actually happening in
production, how do you keep expensive execute_callback logic fast under real agent
traffic, how do you migrate an existing REST API without breaking its consumers, and
how do you eventually package and publish what you’ve built.
If you haven’t completed MCP Security & Authentication for WordPress, stop and do that first. This course builds directly on its custom rate-limiting, capability, and audit-logging patterns rather than repeating them, and several lessons here assume you already understand why the MCP Adapter ships with no built-in OAuth or rate limiting. If you’re new to this track entirely, the real starting point is WordPress AI Foundations, which lays out the whole stack (the Abilities API, MCP, the MCP Adapter, and the PHP AI Client SDK) before any of the other seven courses build on it.
By the end of this course you’ll have designed extensible, hookable abilities, run multiple named MCP servers with distinct permission tiers, built a real custom observability handler, tuned an ability library for repeated agent traffic, migrated a legacy REST API into abilities without breaking existing consumers, thought through enterprise data governance and vendor lock-in, packaged a reusable ability library, faced the MCP Adapter’s honest current limitations, wired up a CI/CD pipeline with PHPUnit, combined REST and MCP surfaces over shared business logic, planned for WordPress core’s continuing evolution, and worked through what it actually takes to publish a commercial MCP plugin on WordPress.org. This is the last course in the track. Finish it, and you’ve covered the entire WordPress AI development stack, start to production.