CanAI technical reference
Templates, the MCP toolset and the hooks, for builders who want the full inventory. The plugin is free and you bring your own agent.
What CanAI builds
Pages render as Twig-templated, semantic HTML, with no shortcodes or nested page-builder markup. Styling is Tailwind and light interactivity is Alpine.js, with Lucide icons available out of the box.
- Compiled, cached CSS. Tailwind output is built and cached per page, so it isn't compiled on every request.
- An editor in wp-admin. HTML, CSS and JS with a preview, for hand-tuning what the agent wrote. "Edit with WPCanAI" sits in the admin bar on any front-end page.
Templates and layouts
Layouts, headers, footers and components are template objects organised by taxonomy, so nothing is copied from page to page.
- Layout delegation. A page can hand its outer chrome to a shared layout, so a header or footer change reaches every page that delegates.
- Archives and special pages. Templates for category, tag, author, search and 404, beyond single posts and pages.
- WooCommerce. Slots for the shop, single product, product category, product loop, cart, checkout and My Account pages, including orders, order-pay, downloads, addresses and payment methods.
The MCP toolset
The agent gets more than 35 operations that mirror the wp-admin screens (61 on a site with the multilingual tools turned on), so the agent and the admin are two doors into the same features. A selection, by job:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
wpcanai-list-pages | Lists CanAI pages with their format, layout and size. |
wpcanai-create-page | Creates a CanAI page with a slug, title and layout. |
wpcanai-read-meta | Reads a page's or template's HTML, CSS, JS, layout and context. |
wpcanai-write-meta | Compiles and saves Twig, Tailwind and Alpine markup in one step. |
wpcanai-replace-in-meta | Finds and replaces inside a page without resending the whole file. |
wpcanai-create-template | Registers a reusable partial or a site-wide layout. |
wpcanai-sideload-url | Pulls an image from a URL into the media library. |
wpcanai-write-menu | Builds and reorders navigation menus. |
wpcanai-read-settings | Reads the theme, Tailwind setup and site preferences. |
wpcanai-purge-cache | Clears the page and edge cache. |
wpcanai-diagnostics | Checks the install and reports problems. |
wpcanai-export | Exports every CanAI page and template, for cloning or backup. |
Version history
Every change the agent makes is logged. You can list snapshots and past operations, inspect a snapshot, restore a whole snapshot or a single operation, and pin a safe point to come back to before a big change.
Pin the current state with CanAI, then redesign the home page hero. If I don't like it, restore the pinned snapshot.
Multilingual sites
When a translation layer is active, the agent can read and write per-language settings, translations, global strings, media mapping, and post and term overrides.
Hooks
These parts are filters, so a developer can change them:
- which template types exist on the site;
- which WooCommerce hooks are available inside templates;
- which WordPress options the agent may read or write;
- how the page-context data passed into templates is assembled.
Connection and access
Agents connect over MCP's HTTP transport to your site's CanAI endpoint. The connection link carries a private key, which acts as the credential:
https://your-site.com/wp-json/mcp/wpcanai/your-private-key
Anyone with the link has the agent's full access, so keep it out of shared files and repositories. The options the agent can touch are limited by an allowlist in CanAI → AI Client → Guardrails.
Requirements
- WordPress 7.0 or later and PHP 8.2 or later.
- An administrator account on the site.
- An AI agent that can connect to a remote MCP server over HTTP, such as Claude Code or Cursor.
- WooCommerce, only if you want the shop templates.