AIWP Designer

An AI-native website design system for WordPress.

Your own AI — Claude, ChatGPT, any MCP client — is the designer. This plugin is the trusted place where that design is checked, stored, versioned and rendered. There is no LLM inside the plugin and no hosted service behind it.

Install

Download aiwp-designer-0.12.1.zip from Releases, then in WordPress go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin and choose that file.

That ZIP holds the plugin and nothing else. Downloading the repository instead gives you the test harness as well, which does not belong in a live site.

You also need Advanced Custom Fields. The free one. ACF Pro is not required.

Requires WordPress 6.6+ and PHP 8.1+.

What it is not

Not a page builder. There is no fixed set of sections, no drag-and-drop canvas, and no "hero / features / testimonials / FAQ" skeleton the AI has to fill in. The AI decides the structure of each page.

How it works

Claude / ChatGPT  ──MCP──▶  AIWP Designer  ──▶  ACF fields + safe template + page CSS
                                   │
                                   ▼
                            WordPress page
                                   │
                                   ▼
                            preview URL  ──▶  the AI opens it, looks, improves

The AI writes four things: a field schema, template markup, page CSS and the starting content. It never writes PHP or JavaScript, and the plugin refuses anything that tries.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.6+
• PHP 8.1+
• Advanced Custom Fields free 6.x (ACF Pro is not required and not used)

Install

1. Install WordPress.
2. Install and activate Advanced Custom Fields (free).
3. Copy aiwp-designer/ into wp-content/plugins/ and activate it.

No build step. No composer install needed.

Connect your AI

1. Open AIWP Designer → MCP Connection.
2. Generate a token. It is shown once.
3. Connect your client:

claude mcp add --transport http aiwp https://yoursite.com/wp-json/aiwp-designer/v1/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

A token acts as one WordPress user and gets exactly that user's capabilities.

Use it

Fill in AIWP Designer → Brand & Business first, then tell your AI:

Analyse my website and create a Services page.

The AI will call workflow_prepare, read the site and its capabilities, plan the page, create it as a draft, open the preview, critique its own work, improve it, and hand it back. Publishing is yours to ask for.

Then edit the content any way you like:

• Edit fields — normal WordPress admin, normal ACF fields
• Ask the AI — "change the headline to …"
• Your own code — get_field() or the REST API

For developers

Content is plain ACF. Nothing is locked into the plugin's renderer.

$headline = get_field( 'hero_headline' );

foreach ( get_field( 'benefits_cards' ) as $card ) {
    echo esc_html( $card['title'] );
}

Headless:

GET /wp-json/aiwp-designer/v1/pages/142/data

A custom theme can ignore AIWP's rendering entirely and use the fields directly.

Documentation

Document	What is in it
docs/building-websites.md	Start here — how to actually build a site with it
docs/architecture.md	How the pieces fit together
docs/template-language.md	The complete .aiwp language
docs/acf-repeater.md	aiwp_repeater field and its storage
docs/mcp.md	Every MCP tool, resource and prompt
docs/forms.md	Forms: declaring, styling, storage, spam
docs/chrome.md	The shared header and footer
docs/prompts.md	The prompt library and how it compiles
docs/rest-api.md	REST endpoints
docs/security.md	What is rejected, and why
docs/development.md	Local setup and tests
IMPLEMENTATION_STATUS.md	What is built and what is not
docs/ADR.md	Every departure from the specification

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later.

Running it yourself

The repository carries a throwaway WordPress to test against.

./setup.sh

That boots WordPress on http://localhost:8090, installs ACF and this plugin, creates an MCP token and prints the line that connects your AI client to it. ./reset.sh puts it back to empty.

The tests:

# unit tests, no WordPress needed
curl -sSL -o tests/phpunit.phar https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit-10.phar
docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/w" -w /w php:8.3-cli php tests/phpunit.phar

# end to end, against a running site
AIWP_SITE=http://localhost:8090 python3 tests/smoke.py

RUNBOOK.md has the longer version.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later, the same as WordPress.