Content Designer

An AI media director for your WordPress drafts. It reads a post like an editor, decides where a visual genuinely earns its place — to conceptualize an idea or to pace long text, never decoration — generates it in your configured style with Google Gemini, and places it at the right section boundary. It never publishes: placement stops at the draft.

Bring your own API key. The plugin ships no credentials, proxies nothing through a third party, and calls Google directly with the key you configure.

Built on three modern WordPress primitives: the Abilities API, the AI Client, and the Interactivity API.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.7+ (Abilities API features require 7.0+)
• PHP 7.4+
• A Google Gemini API key — free from https://aistudio.google.com/apikey

Installation

Copy the plugin directory into wp-content/plugins/content-designer and activate it, or install the zip through Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.

Configuration

The API key is resolved in this order, first match wins (Settings::api_key()):

1. CONTENT_DESIGNER_GEMINI_API_KEY constant in wp-config.php — recommended
2. LAUNCHY_ILLUSTRATOR_GEMINI_API_KEY constant — deprecated, see Upgrading below
3. GEMINI_API_KEY constant
4. GEMINI_API_KEY environment variable
5. The gemini_api_key field on Settings → Content Designer

Prefer a constant. It keeps the key out of the database, and therefore out of every backup and database export. See wp-config-sample.php. The settings screen always names the source the key is actually being read from, so a forgotten constant can't masquerade as a saved field.

Remaining settings live at Settings → Content Designer: style preset, your own saved styles, planner guidance, reference images, how many variations to generate, and cleanup behavior.

Usage

Two surfaces, one pipeline.

In the post editor. Open the Illustrate sidebar and scan the post you are writing. The structural read lands immediately, placements follow when the editorial pass returns, and images appear one at a time — keep or reject each as it arrives, while the rest are still rendering.

Scanning sends the editor's current content, so unsaved edits are included and nothing needs saving first. Kept images are inserted with insertBlocks, which means the post is never rewritten underneath you and every image is its own undo step. Anchors are pinned to block clientIds right after the scan, so you can keep writing during a run without images landing in the wrong place.

Tools → Illustrate. Pick a draft from a list and run the same pipeline. This surface writes to post_content server-side, so use it when the post is not already open in the editor.

The panel appears on post types supporting both editor and thumbnail (the hero sets the featured image). Filter content_designer_editor_post_types to change that.

Styles

Style is entirely settings-driven. Seven presets ship built in — clean editorial (default), claymation, paper-cut, whiteboard, retro, modern-tech, and watercolor-storybook. You can also write and save your own styles in the admin, with their own master prompt, planner guidance, and character reference images.

Plugins add presets through the content_designer_style_presets filter. launchy-style-preset.php is the worked example: "Launchy", the 1930s rubber-hose mascot style from mikebal.com. Copy that file, swap the strings and reference URLs, and you have your own brand preset.

It sits at the plugin root rather than in examples/ on purpose: WordPress scans one level into each plugin directory, so a second file with a plugin header there registers as its own activatable plugin. Activate Content Designer — Launchy Style Preset (example) separately; its activation hook selects the launchy preset unless you have already saved a style of your own.

Extending

New media types extend Media_Types\Media_Type and register on the content_designer_register_media_types action. The planner, admin UI, REST routes, and abilities all pick them up automatically. See examples/example-diagram-media-type.php.

Anchors

A placement carries two positions, and they are not interchangeable:

They differ because parse_blocks() emits a null-name freeform block for the whitespace between every pair of real blocks, and the editor never shows those. Three authored blocks parse to five entries. Handing anchor_index to insertBlocks() would place images at roughly double their intended position. tests/anchor-mapping.php locks this down.

Abilities

Registered under the content-designer category:

Tests

There is no PHPUnit harness. The checks under tests/ are plain scripts that run against a real WordPress via WP-CLI, which is enough to cover the logic where a silent error would be expensive:

wp eval-file wp-content/plugins/content-designer/tests/anchor-mapping.php
wp eval-file wp-content/plugins/content-designer/tests/rest-outline.php
wp eval-file wp-content/plugins/content-designer/tests/rest-discard.php

Each prints one line per assertion and exits non-zero on failure. None of them spend an AI call.

Upgrading from Launchy Illustrator 1.x

2.0.0 renames the plugin. The pipeline, settings, and REST contract are unchanged in behavior, but every identifier moved:

What happens automatically: your settings, saved styles, and the planning/provenance meta on existing posts are copied to the new names the first time 2.0.0 loads. The old rows are left in place, so rolling back to 1.x still finds its data. The old API key constant still works, and the settings screen will tell you to rename it.

What you have to do yourself:

• Because the directory name changed, WordPress sees a new plugin. Activate Content Designer, and deactivate Launchy Illustrator if it is still listed.
• If you deploy from git, point the deployment at /wp-content/plugins/content-designer.
• Any code of yours that filters launchy_illustrator_* or calls launchy/v1 needs updating. There are no back-compat shims for hooks or routes.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.