Before you migrate anything, get the premise right, because a lot of material floating
around right now gets it wrong. The Abilities API merged into WordPress core with
6.9 (“Gene”), released December 2, 2025. The PHP AI Client merged into core with
7.0, announced March 24, 2026, giving you wp_ai_client_prompt() with no separate
install. The MCP Adapter did not merge into core. It remains a separate plugin,
maintained on its own release cadence (currently v0.5.0), by deliberate decision of the
WordPress AI team. If you read or heard otherwise, this course corrects that in its
first lesson.
This course is for one specific, common situation: you (or a codebase you’ve inherited)
built against the standalone, pre-core wordpress/abilities-api Composer package. That
package is now archived, as of February 2026, because its functionality shipped into
WordPress core itself. If your composer.json still lists it, or your plugin still
bootstraps it manually, this course walks you through removing that dependency,
confirming a correct WordPress 6.9+ minimum, fixing the single most common real-world
issue (abilities that exist but never show up to an AI agent), and auditing your own
code and docs for the same “MCP Adapter is core” mistake this course’s own brief
originally contained.
If you haven’t worked with the Abilities API or MCP Adapter at all yet, start with WordPress AI Foundations first, it covers what an ability is and how the stack fits together from scratch. If you already have a working MCP server built the current way, see Build a WordPress MCP Server From Scratch. This course assumes you’re migrating existing code, not starting fresh.