Under the Hood: How Agentic WordPress Works

Workshop repo for WP Suomi. This branch is the starting point — it sets up your environment and nothing else. We build the actual code together on the day.

Please get this working before you arrive. A laptop that breaks at minute three costs the whole room fifteen minutes, and the check below takes two.

1. Pick an environment

Pick whichever you already have. If you have none of them, use wp-env.

WordPress 7.1 is required, not just recommended. It ships the pieces we rely on in core, and the setup guides pin it for you.

Note the Node versions differ: wp-env is happy on 18, but the Studio CLI declares engines.node >= 22.

What's actually been tested

Linux is checked automatically, so if something rots you'll see it in the badge above rather than on the day. Local on Linux is untested — it has a Linux build, but nobody has run this repo against it.

If you're on Windows

The setup scripts here are bash, so run them inside WSL2 rather than PowerShell:

1. Install WSL2 and a distro (wsl --install)
2. Enable Docker Desktop's WSL2 integration
3. Clone the repo and follow the wp-env guide from inside your WSL shell

That puts you on the Linux path, which is tested.

Without WSL2 the scripts will not run — and the error will be misleading, because Windows' own bash.exe in System32 is a WSL launcher, not a shell. With no distro installed it fails complaining about WSL rather than telling you anything useful. We hit exactly this and ran out of time to chase it further, which is why Windows is marked unverified rather than broken.

If it doesn't work, pair up on the day. You do not need a working laptop to follow along, and we would much rather you watched than spent the session fighting an environment.

2. Set it up

The short version for wp-env:

git clone git@github.com:saarnilauri/wpsuomi-workshop-under-the-hood.git
cd wpsuomi-workshop-under-the-hood
npm ci
npm run setup

That boots WordPress 7.1, installs a few plugins we need later (without activating them), adds two demo posts, and then checks everything.

For Studio or Local, follow the matching guide — each has one step that has to happen in that app.

3. Check it

npm run verify        # wp-env

# Studio or Local: point it at your site first
export WPSUOMI_WP_PATH="/path/to/your/site"
bash bin/verify-env.sh

It must end with All good. See you at the workshop.

If it doesn't, bring the output and we'll sort it out in the first five minutes — or pair up with someone whose laptop works and keep moving.

What we'll do on the day

Build one small, real piece of WordPress functionality, and then drive it four different ways without changing it: from your own PHP, from an ordinary hook, from an external AI agent, and from WordPress itself.

The code arrives here as tagged checkpoints shortly before the session, so if you fall behind you can jump straight to the next one and rejoin. Nothing to do about that now.

Optional, for the second half

Not needed for the hands-on part, and not needed to follow along:

• An AI provider key (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Mistral), or
• Ollama with a tool-capable model: ollama pull qwen2.5:3b

License

GPL-2.0-or-later.